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THE MAKING AND THE 

UNMAKING OF A 

DULLARD 



THE MAKING AND THE 

UNMAKING OF A 

DULLARD 



By 

Thomas Edward Shields, Ph.D., LL.D. 

Associate Professor of Psychology in 

the Catholic University of America 

Author of 

'The Education of Our Girls" 



THE CATHOLIC EDUCATION PRESS 

WASHINGTON, D. C. 

All rights reserved. 



j LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

Two Co Dies Received J 

FEB ?? 1903 I 

Copi- rife ut Entry 

CLASS O. XXc, No, 

COPY 3/ 



islU^ 



Imprimatur. 



© JAMES CARDINAL GIBBONS 



Copyright, 1909, by T. E. Shields. 



* • 



Go tbe flMsunt>erstoo& 
<lbfR>ren 

Who are reached the stone of dis- 
couragement instead of the biead 
of hope and who are branded "dull 
and backward" when laid upon the 
Procrustean bed of closely graded 
schools 

Gbte Book 



is 2>eMcateS> in Moving 
S^mpatbB 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I Studevan's Omadhaun . . 27 

II A Diagnosis 36 

III The Mental Record ... 45 

^ IV Causes of Dullness in 

Children 53 

V Alternating Phases of De- 
velopment 68 

VI The Atypical Child in 

School 73 

VII Early Memory Pictures . 80 
VIII The Making of a Dullard 92 

IX Into the Depths 98 

X The Awakening 107 

XI The Development of the 

Number Concept . . .118 
XII Development of Spatial 

Relationship . . . . .123 

XIII Contact With Nature . . 138 

XIV Germinal Truths .... 143 
XV The Germinal Concept in 

Mechanics 150 



Contents 

XVI The Development of the 

Lever 155 

XVII Sense Experience and Lit- 
erature 162 

XVIII A Ray of Hope 170 

XIX Judicious Praise 177 

XX The Dance of the Moon- 
beams 184 

XXI A Day-dream 190 

XXII A New Problem 196 

XXIII The Builders of Science . 205 

XXIV Rediscovering Fundamen- 

tal Truths 211 

XXV A Successful Invention . 219 

XXVI A Family Wetblanket . . 225 

XXVII The First Triumph . . . 229 

XXVIII The Parting of the Ways 233 

XXIX Illusions 242 

XXX Transitory Phases .... 249 

XXXI Self-Reliance 255 

XXXII Learning to Read .... 263 

XXXIII A Widening Horizon ... 270 

XXXIV The Turning Point . . . 276 
XXXV A Resolve 282 



PREFACE 

Though recent progress in educational the- 
ory and practice has for the most part kept in 
view the normal child and the development of 
normal faculties, it is gratifying to note a grow- 
ing interest in those less fortunate children 
who, for one reason or another, fall below 
what might be called the level of school in- 
telligence. That the organism should have its 
pathology no less than its physiology is the 
plain requirement of common sense as it is also 
a scientific necessity. Likewise it is clear that 
psychology of the normal mind must find its 
counterpart in the study of mental disease. 
And now that the advance of knowledge has 
made possible a more thorough diagnosis and 
a more successful treatment of those defects 
which hinder the growth of the mind, it seems 
reasonable to hope for something like a sys- 
tem of educational therapeutics which will 
turn toward the school many children who 
would otherwise go their way to the asylum. 



8 Preface 

The Catholic Church from the earliest times 
has put forth the most earnest efforts to bring 
the blessing of education within the reach of 
those to whom nature seemingly refused the 
power or the opportunity of learning. In 
Rome especially, the Sovereign Pontiffs have 
been careful to provide institutions for the 
blind, the deaf, and other classes of defective 
children. The Holy See has also blessed and 
encouraged those associations of unselfish men 
and women who have given their lives to train- 
ing such children in knowledge and virtue. 
And it is pleasing to see upon the pages of 
educational history the names of many indi- 
vidual Catholics who have made valuable con- 
tributions to the method of treating the less 
gifted or hopelessly dull and backward pupils 
to be found in every school. 

The work which Dr. Shields has prepared is 
certain, in my judgment, to interest and assist 
all those who are concerned with the education 
of defectives. His study of the dullard is 
based on a thorough psychological insight; but 
what is more important, it is evidently inspired 



Preface 9 

by a hearty sympathy for the parents and teach- 
ers upon whom the care of such children must 
devolve. I sincerely trust that this careful 
analysis and the numerous suggestions which 
are offered in his pages will be at once an en- 
lightenment and a stimulation to his readers. 
The book has been cast in the form of a dia- 
logue which permits an easy presentation of 
the author's ideas while it offers full scope for 
the discussion of some delicate problems in 
psychology. I feel sure that in thus survey- 
ing the subject from various points of view 
Dr. Shields will not only open up new lines 
of thought where much serious thinking is 
needed, but will also create for the dullard a 
sympathy at once sincere and intelligent that 
will go far towards making of these unfortu- 
nate little ones useful men and women. 

D. J. O'CONNELL, 

Rector j Catholic University. 



INTRODUCTION 

The dullard is the trial of every teacher, and 
he is the prolific source of heartache and hu- 
miliation to his parents. His days are eked 
out in discouragement and the future stretches 
out before him a barren waste with no ambi- 
tions beckoning to him and no ray of hope to 
illumine his path. And yet, he has a soul to 
save and a life that must be lived out among 
his fellows, whether in honor or in dishonor. 
Misunderstood by his companions, abused by 
his superiors, held up to the school as an ex- 
ample to be avoided, the butt of ridicule for 
the smart, jeered at by the thoughtless and the 
ill-bred, with all the currents of life soured and 
turned back upon their source, the dullard too 
frequently finds his way to the Juvenile Court 
and from thence he passes on to recruit the 
ranks of the vagabond and the criminal. 

The dullard is sometimes born to his low 
estate, but he is more frequently the product 
of mistaken educational methods in the home 



12 Introduction. 

and in the school. He is not a rare visitant; 
his number is increasing rapidly, particularly 
in the schools of our large cities. According 
to conservative estimates ten per cent of the 
children attending the public schools of New 
York City must be classed with the dull and 
backward. Dr. Groszmann, a competent au- 
thority on the matter, is responsible for the 
statement that there are from six to seven 
atypical children in every schoolroom in New- 
ark, N. J. Those two cities do not constitute 
a striking exception in the number of these un- 
fortunate children to be found in the school 
population. 

People of philanthropic tendencies are much 
exercised over this deplorable state of affairs 
and they are ready with various remedies, such 
as more frequent bathing, more abundant food, 
sanitary housing, settlement work, fresh air 
excursions, etc., but there is little hope of 
reaching a permanent cure until the case, with 
all its difficulties, is fully understood and the 
contributory causes laid bare. 



Introduction. 13;. 

It should be observed at the outset that the 
educational failure of our present school sys- 
tem is not confined to dull and atypical chil- 
dren. Recent evidence, such as that furnished 
by the West Point examinations and by the 
Boards and Committees appointed to investi- 
gate public education in various parts of the 
country, points to the fact that there is some- 
thing fundamentally wrong with the school 
system, since it is grinding out dullards in ever 
increasing numbers and failing to bring even, 
the brighter children up to a reasonable effi- 
ciency in those matters which constitute the 
staple of the curriculum. 

Educationists of varying degrees of profi- 
ciency and of all shades of pedagogic belief 
are at work on the problem. Child study, 
genetic and applied psychology, and sociology 
have each made its contribution. Remedies 
have also been offered by the advocates of 
moral and religious training, of physical cul- 
ture, of athletics and of industrial and tech- 
nical education. The literature of the subject 



14 Introduction. 

is growing rapidly, but it may be questioned 
whether we are as rapidly approaching a sat- 
isfactory adjustment of the school to the needs 
of the child. 

This book, it is believed, may contribute 
something towards the solution of these prob- 
lems. It is cast in popular form in the hope 
that it may reach parents and the pupils who 
need its message as well as the more technically 
trained workers in the field of education. 

The story of Studevan's omadhaun is in no 
sense a creation of the imagination, nor are its 
facts gathered from various sources to be 
moulded into one for the purposes of pedagogi- 
cal exposition. The story in its entirety is a 
faithful transcript of the record that was 
burned into the heart and brain of the omad- 
haun and read by himself years after he had 
fought his way back to the company of normal 
and intellectual men. It has a message of 
courage and hope for the dullard, who will 
probably be the only one to fully appreciate 
its force, but it can hardly fail to awaken in 



Introduction 15 

the hearts of parents and teachers a deeper 
sympathy for these unfortunate victims of 
mistaken educational methods and to give 
a keener insight into their condition, nor 
will the book be found devoid of suggestions 
for those who are engaged in the elaboration 
of methods and the shaping of educational 
policies. 

It is vain to treat symptoms instead ofi dis- 
ease, yet nothing more is possible until we 
fully understand the causes of the evils of 
which complaint is made. The problem is usu- 
ally approached from the outside. The dull- 
ard is observed as if he were a frog or a 
tadpole by the educationist who has no light 
to guide him but that derived from the mem- 
ory of successful school days and a brilliant 
educational career. Dr. Studevan here pre- 
sents the frog's point of view and he has some- 
thing to say which is well worth listening to, 
even if you, in your superior wisdom, should 
find reasons for differing from his conclu- 
sions. 

The problems discussed in this book have a 



1 6 Introduction 

bearing also on the education of normal chil- 
dren. It is more than probable that the same 
causes which are producing the ever increas- 
ing number of dullards are also operative in 
the production of the less aggravated forms of 
the malady exhibited in the general retardation 
of public school pupils to which reference has 
just been made. When these causes are fully 
understood, we shall not have far to seek for 
effective remedies. 

The average child spends only a small frac- 
tion of his time in school. To understand the 
influences which are operating upon his devel- 
oping mind and character we must take a view 
that is much wider than that afforded by the 
school. The child's home, his companions 
when out of school, his vacations, and the in- 
fluences exerted upon him by his occupations, 
must all be taken into account by those who 
would understand and intelligently guide the 
processes of his unfolding life. 

The profound social and economic changes 
of the past few decades have completely trans- 
formed the environment of our children. The 



Introduction. 17 

•old educative forces, developed through count- 
less generations, have been destroyed and noth- 
ing equivalent has been found to replace them. 
The school must take over this new burden 
and this new responsibility. It must do for 
the children of this generation what the indus- 
trial home of the past did for the children of 
former generations. The parent and the teach- 
er, in too many cases the product of the older 
home conditions, have no key to the child's 
mind and heart and, as a consequence, are un- 
able to maintain their supremacy and to guide 
him prudently in the situations which confront 
him. Their own education was rooted in mus- 
cle and sense training, in industrial processes 
and in real duties, but these things were not 
considered by them in the light of educational 
forces. The supplementary school drills in the 
three R's stand out in their consciousness as 
the sum total of their education and they are 
amazed today at the fact that children who re- 
ceive far superior drills in these subjects re- 
main lamentably deficient in intellectual power. 
They do not realize that the children of today 



1 8 Introduction 

are wholly deprived of the best educative in- 
fluences that were operative in their own child- 
hood. 

Recent social changes are not less pro- 
nounced than industrial changes or less far- 
reaching in their effects upon our children. 
The father and the older members of the fam- 
ily are compelled to seek employment outside 
the home, and the children are thus deprived 
of their companionship and protection. The 
child begins his individual life in almost total 
dependence upon his parents, and during the 
period of his development he leans upon au- 
thority in every phase of his intellectual and 
moral life. During adolescence his mind 
comes under the dominion of intrinsic evi- 
dence and he gradually learns to shape his con- 
duct freely in the light of the truth which he 
assimilates, but even in the highest reaches of 
mature development such self-determination 
affects only a small part of life. 

The teaching of positive religion, national 
customs, and family traditions in the past de- 
termined the conduct of the child and of the 



Introduction 19 

man. Today, the environment of the child, 
particularly of the child brought up in our 
cities, is such as to destroy all reverence for 
authority and to break the force of creeds, na- 
tional customs and family traditions that have 
played so large a part in bringing to balanced 
maturity the minds and characters of our fore- 
fathers. The conflict of various national cus- 
toms tends to make all such customs absurd 
to the child. "Frenchy," "Dutchy," "Paddy," 
"Dago," "Polock," etc., are terms which soon 
make the sensitive child seek to escape from 
the thraldom of national customs and to avoid 
all those practices which would differentiate 
him from his fellow pupils. These children 
soon cease to look upon their parents and their 
own people with reverence or to treat with re- 
spect the opinions and the practices of their 
forefathers. Similarly, the conflict of creeds, 
inevitable where the children of many religious 
denominations mingle freely, results in robbing 
these poor disinherited children of the support 
which their fathers found in the teachings and 
in the practice of their religion. 



20 Introduction 

These evils, instead of being alleviated in 
every possible way by the school authorities, 
are usually aggravated by unwise and short- 
sighted zealots who, in order to produce good 
citizens, would gladly destroy national cus- 
toms, and who, in order to produce broad- 
minded men, would remove the authority and 
the positive teaching of religion. Under these 
conditions the immature mind and character 
of the child is suddenly deprived of all those 
helps that nature intended should be present 
to support and sustain him until his mind 
reaches maturity. From the day he enters 
school he must be able to rely upon his own 
intelligence for guidance in all those matters 
that have been the chief concern of the noblest 
and wisest among the children of men since 
the dawn of human history. These zealous 
levelers of national customs and religious be- 
liefs seem to forget that the adult may draw 
upon the experience of the race, while the child 
has only his own inexperience to look to for 
guidance. And just when all this burden of 
determining lines of conduct and of building 



Introduction 21 

character is placed upon the child's budding in- 
telligence the old and tried educative forces 
of the industrial home are swept away by mod- 
ern economic conditions. 

Sense training, participation in complete in- 
dustrial processes and the steadying influence 
of real duties have dropped away from our 
children and to supply their place the schools 
offer a more elaborate program of the three 
R's and a strictly formal academic discipline. 
This aspect of the school situation was well 
summed up in an address delivered recently 
before the Century Club of Detroit by a pub- 
lic school man of wide experience who la- 
bored for many years with marked success in 
the public schools of Chicago and who is now 
principal of a high school in New York City. 
"Every loss sustained by the home was 
claimed by the school, but instead of supply- 
ing that diversity of industrial experience 
which the young folks were losing, the school 
continued to develop upon its bookish side 
until it almost completely separated the chil- 
dren from the original instinctive interests of 






22 Introduction 

life. In place of supplementing and varying 
the child's existence, the school, by enlarging 
a supplementary service into a principal con- 
sideration, has brought us to the spectacle of 
systematic education ignoring the instincts, 
tastes, and desires of its material, judging of 
its needs by its own historically narrow stand- 
ards, possessed of great influence by the per- 
sistence of a tradition once adequate, endowed 
with tremendous strength by the perfection 
of a legalized system, but developing the race 
on a plan appalingly warped and one-sided. 
The public school is demanding more and 
more of the children's time for its, as yet, un- 
justified purposes; little children are loaded 
with books beyond not only their mental but 
their physical strength. The parent who 
would play with his children must yield to the 
inexorable demands of school work at home. 
The schoolmaster growls at music lessons, 
whines at dancing school, bemoans the chil- 
dren's party, and claims the whole child, for 
what? — for the things that my frank up-the- 
state friend says are the only things our public 



Introduction 



23 



schools sincerely care for: reading, writing, 
ciphering, a few facts of geography, history 
and science, that is all. Personally, I had very 
much rather not have my own children de- 
velop into the type proposed by the school- 
master. I have the feeling that in the chil- 
dren themselves are suggestions more worth 
following than the artificial, one-sided, and 
isolated bookish ideas that educational systems 
have set at the center of their plan. In this, 
if I read the papers correctly, I am not unique. 
The prevailing note of comment on public edu- 
cation is that it has not made good." 

This summing up of the situation is typical 
of much that is being thought and said on the 
subject at present. The schools have failed to 
adjust themselves to the new conditions of 
the child. They have failed to reach his vital 
interests, and hence an army of truant officers 
is required to compel attendance. The Massa- 
chusetts Commission says, "There is a vague 
feeling of dissatisfaction with the results of 
the existing public school system. The schools 
are too exclusively bookish in their spirit, 



24 Introduction 

scope, and methods." Children under sixteen 
are not usually employed in the factories of 
Massachusetts, the law does not compel chil- 
dren over fourteen years of age to attend 
school, and Dr. Kingsbury has shown that 
25,000 children, between the ages of fourteen 
and sixteen, in the State of Massachusetts 
alone, are out of school and idle for the most 
part. The schools do not attract our chil- 
dren. The attendance laws are requiring more 
and more executive agents and are costing 
more and more money to enforce. We are 
compelling multitudes of our children to take 
what neither they nor their parents want. If 
the education given in our schools reached the 
lives of our children and lifted up the children 
and their parents as it should, we would have 
a different story to tell. 

In this book an attempt is made to show 
some of the things that render school life 
odious to the children, some of those things 
that make truants and dullards out of the best 
of children. Minds with the greatest strength 
at maturity often develop slowly in early child- 



Introduction 25 

hood, and these have frequently been humili- 
ated and discouraged by the ignorant teacher 
who mistakes their condition for congenital 
idiocy, native perversity, or unredeemable lazi- 
ness. Again, smell and taste, touch and mus- 
cle sense, lie deep in the nervous system and 
are the earliest to develop. They lend strength 
and vigor to the mental content derived 
through the eye and the ear. And our schools, 
ignoring this, too frequently appeal to the eye 
and ear alone at a time when the brain is not 
ready for development in these directions, with 
the result that children, with all the fair prom- 
ise of future greatness, are rejected and brand- 
ed as dull and backward, to be driven from 
the school in discouragement and revolt and 
to add to the vicious element of society lives 
that if properly directed would be found 
among its greatest benefactors. 

Finally, an attempt is made to show the re- 
lationship that exists between industrial pro-, 
cesses and home duties on the one hand and 
the development of the child's mind and char- 
acter on the other. It is not expected, of 



1 



26 Introduction 

course, that other children will go through ex- 
periences similar to those that befell the oma- 
dhaun, nevertheless, in the story of his return 
to normal conditions, there may readily be 
traced the power of sensory and muscular 
training to awaken and strengthen purely in- 
tellectual processes. The whole story is full 
of suggestiveness for those who are respon- 
sible for the work of our schools and who are 
endeavoring to secure a proper adjustment be- 
tween our educational systems and the new 
environmental conditions in which our chil- 
dren live. 



CHAPTER I 

Studevan's Omadhaun 

"Dr. Studevan's lecture at our last meeting," 
said Mr. O'Brien, "brought to a graceful con- 
clusion our desultory discussions on Co-edu- 
cation and the Higher Education of Women; 
it gave us a pleasant evening and an oppor- 
tunity to meet a number of delightful people. 
But we have with us this evening in the two 
new members who have joined our little circle 
the best fruit of the Doctor's effort. Miss Rus- 
sell's presence will add a new charm to our 
meetings, while her training and her position 
as model teacher in the Lee School render her 
eminently qualified to enlighten us on the 
characteristic features of the modern school- 
room; and Judge Russell's long experience at 
the bar and on the bench makes him just the 
man to keep the peace between Dr. Studevan 
and Professor Shannon." 

"I object to that role," said the Judge, "I 



28 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

have quite enough of that all day. I came 
here to learn something about modern educa- 
tion and its methods, which Alice informs me 
have undergone many radical changes since 
my school days. I have an ancient grudge 
against the schoolmaster for cruel treatment 
that has kept me from following the develop- 
ments in education." 

"If you were attending the schools of to- 
day," said Professor Shannon, "you might 
have a grudge of quite another kind. Judg- 
ing from G. Stanley Hall's article in the Feb- 
ruary number of Munsey's the boys are at pres- 
ent suffering from too much gentleness. Let 
me read you a few lines from this interesting 
article : 

" 'Many of the boys, especially in the upper 
classes of the high schools, are so out-num- 
bered that they are practically in a girls' school, 
taught by women at just that age when vigor- 
ous male control and example are more needed 
than at any other time of life. The natural 
exuberance of the boy is often toned down, but 
if he is to be well virified later, ought he not in 



Studevan's Omadhaun 29 

the middle teens, and later, to be so boisterous 
at times as to be rather unfit for constant com- 
panionship with girls ? Is there not something 
wrong with the high school boy who can truly 
be called a perfect gentleman, or whose conduct 
and character conform to the ideals of the av- 
erage unmarried female teacher? Boys need 
a different discipline, moral regimen, atmos- 
phere, and method of work * * * Under 
female influence certainly — as, alas, too often 
under that of the male teacher — form now al- 
ways tends to take precedence over content. 
The boy revolts at much method with meager 
matter, craves utility and application. Too of- 
ten, when the very germs of his manhood are 
burgeoning, all these instincts are denied, and 
he is compelled to learn the stated lessons which 
every one else in the country is learning at his 
age, to work all day with girls. As a result, 
without knowing what is the matter, his inter- 
est gradually declines, and he drops out of 
school, when, with a robust tone or opportunity 
to vent his boy nature, such as prevailed at Har- 
row, Eton, or Rugby, he would have fought it 



30 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

through and done well. The feminization of 
the school spirit, discipline and personnel is bad 
for the boy. His manners are improved, and 
in this the woman teacher sees a great excel- 
lence; but this is the age when some brutish 
elements in his nature should have had an op- 
portunity to vent and work themselves off in a 
wholesome way. If he stays in school, he may 
tend to grow content with mechanical and 
memoriter work and to excel on lines of girls* 
qualities, while failing to develop the best traits 
of his own sex/ " 

"There was no danger of feminization in my 
school days," said the Judge. "The school- 
master used a vigorous masculine control which 
he exercised with his cat-o-nine-tails. When 
a boy didn't know his lesson he was mounted 
on the back of a larger boy, while a third 
applied the cat-o-nine-tails vigorously to the 
least intelligent part of him. In fact, the school- 
master didn't seem to think that he had done 
his full duty by a boy unless he had flogged 
him two or three times a week." s 

"The schoolmaster of those days," said Mr. 



Studevan's Omadhaun 31 

O'Brien, "evidently believed in the proverb*, 
'Spare the rod and spoil the child/ but you 
must have a very unforgiving disposition, 
Judge, if you have harbored this against him 
all these years." 

"My grievance is deeper than that," replied 
the Judge, "although I have never forgiven the 
teacher for flogging the boys; it was a cow- 
ardly advantage that he took because of his 
position and superior strength. But I suffered 
in a way that none of the other boys did. The 
teacher scared me one day into speechlessness, 
which injured my vocal organs so that I was 
unable to speak for sixteen years, and I have 
stuttered all my life as a consequence of that 
teacher's blundering." 

"The schools have changed much since the 
forties," said Dr. Studevan ; "and, though I do 
not doubt that this change is due, in large 
measure, to the constantly increasing number 
of women teachers, still, there are at work 
other causes no less potent. 

"In my early days I had a woman teacher 
who knew how to handle the birch quite as well 



32 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

as any man. She sent me home from school as 
an 'omadhaun' at the age of nine and advised 
my parents to put me to work on the farm 
since, in her opinion, there was no hope that 
I would ever learn anything. 

"At the age of thirteen I fell from a load of 
hay and broke my arm. While it was mending 
I was sent back to school, but after two months' 
trial and a good thrashing I was again returned 
to my parents with the same verdict. However, 
I hold no grudge against my teachers. They 
acted up to the best lights of their time and, as 
it happens, it was a fortunate thing for me that 
I was taken out of school and put to work on 
the farm during those years." 

"Aren't you drawing on your imagination 
just a little?" asked Miss Ruth. 

"No, it's all the solemn, sober truth. I was 
known in all the countryside for eight years 
as 'Studevan's omadhaun.' Of course I need 
not add that my teachers and parents and neigh- 
bors generally, were mistaken. When I came up 
put of the darkness and discovered that "I was 
not different from other men I became very 



Studevan's Omadhaun 33 

much interested in my own case. It was this, 
in fact, that gave me my first and my abiding 
interest in physiological psychology. I could 
not bring myself to believe that God had given 
me a soul different from the souls of other boys. 
I felt that the cause of my condition must be 
found on the physical side. I have since come 
to understand that not only was this true, but 
that my case was simply an exaggerated form 
of what is to be found in every school in the 
country." 

"Please tell us how you got out of that con- 
dition," said Miss Russell. "I have a large 
over-grown girl in my room. I can't teach 
her anything and yet she seems to be a good 
girl and I don't believe she is an idiot." 

"Have you been able to clear up your diffi- 
culty, Doctor?" asked Miss Ruth. "When did 
your real mental development begin ? Did some 
teacher who understood your case give you just 
the kind of help you needed?" 

"No; teachers had nothing to do with it. I 
don't object in the least to telling you all about 
it; but it is a long story and one that I fear 



34 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

has more interest for me than it can possibly 
have for any one else." 

"I don't see how you make that out," re- 
plied Miss Russell. "The dullard is the trial of 
every teacher's life. And, since you have 
passed through that phase of existence your- 
self, you should be able to help the rest of us 
solve the problem. But, of course, I don't wish 
to pry into your personal affairs, though I con- 
fess I'm dying of curiosity to know all about 
it." 

"As to that," replied the Doctor, "you need 
have no fear. I am not the least bit sensitive 
on the subject. My own case has caused me 
to understand a great many things that would 
otherwise have remained a sealed book to me. 
I have often told the story from the lecture plat- 
form. As you may realize, I have a deep sym- 
pathy for the over-grown, dull boy who is mis- 
understood by everybody; and if this chapter 
in my own life will serve in any way to bring 
help to him, I am quite willing that it should 
be used for that purpose. 

"I will tell you as much about my case as 



Studevan's Omadhaun 35 

you care to listen to at another time, but to- 
night I want to hear your father's story. I 
have known the Judge for many years without 
having suspected that there was such a tragedy 
in his life." 



CHAPTER II 

A Diagnosis 

"Judge," said the Doctor, "won't you please 
please tell us what caused you to remain dumb 
during a period so far exceeding that of the 
speechlessness of Zachary?" 

"I would much rather hear an account of 
your case, Doctor, all that I know of my dumb- 
ness is soon told. 

"I was born in 1840, and I must have been 
a precocious child for I went on the stump for 
President Polk in 1844, while still in curls and 
pinafores. I was out on the front of the stage 
one night, reciting a little speech for Polk, when 
some of the scenery behind me fell and caught 
fire, and the stage manager swore like the son 
of a sea cook. I was frightened to death." 

"Was it the stage manager's tall talk that 
struck you dumb?" asked Mr. O'Brien. 

"No, that calamity befell me on my first day 
in school three years later. We lived in a lit- 



A Diagnosis $7 

tie village and the teacher boarded at our 
house. I could read quite well before I went 
to school, but the strange surroundings made 
me bashful and when the reading class was 
called, I remained in my seat. The teacher 
ordered me to join the class, but I only sucked 
my thumb. At last he came down to my bench. 
I wanted to read to him alone but he wouldn't 
listen to me. I think he wanted to show the 
rest of the class how well I could read and my 
conduct irritated him. He grabbed me by the 
collar and yanked me out of my seat and 
shoved me into the fourth or fifth place from 
the head of the class. I was scared stiff and 
when it came my turn to read I couldn't utter 
a word. This frightened me still more. I felt 
that there was something wrong inside of me 
and I began to bellow. After the other chil- 
dren were dismissed that evening the teacher 
and my brothers and sisters scolded me for 
having disgraced them and ridiculed me for 
having made such a fool of myself. I tried to 
answer them but I could not, and as soon as I 
got outside I ran as hard as I could to my 



38 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

father's office. Daddy and I were always 
chums and I felt that I could tell him every- 
thing, but when I got there I couldn't get a 
word out. This scared me so that I fell on the 
floor in a faint, and I have no recollection of 
what happened for some days afterward." 

"Wasn't a doctor called in to attend you?" 
asked Dr. Studevan. 

"No," replied the Judge. "I was up and 
around shortly. There was a sort of fatalism 
about my people; the fact that I was unable 
to speak convinced them that I was an idiot. 
They were sorry for me and hopeless about 
it; that was all. I think my father was the 
only one who declined to accept that as a so- 
lution of my case. 

"I went back to school after a while and 
listened to what the others were saying. In 
fact I got along in the ordinary subjects about 
as well as the other children. 

"There was nothing wrong with my under- 
standing, nevertheless, for a long time I made 
no effort to talk. After I had learned to write 
I used to hang a slate around my neck and 



A Diagnosis 39 

write my answers whenever it was absolutely 
necessary to reply. When I was nineteen I 
undertook to edit a country newspaper at which 
I worked four years. I used to lock myself in 
a back room and it would have been easier for 
any one to get at the Czar of Russia than to 
get at me. The paper was good enough of its 
kind for that day, but of course it wouldn't 
look like much now." 

"How did you overcome your stammering 
and learn to talk?" asked Miss Ruth. 

"As you see, I never did get over it; I have 
stuttered all my life. When I was twenty- 
three years old I moved into the city and se- 
cured a position on a large daily, where I soon 
found that I could not get along without talk- 
ing. I realized that I would have to learn to 
talk or remain a hewer of wood and a drawer 
of water all my life, so I determined to talk. 
My first attempts were very painful ; I often fell 
on the floor from sheer exhaustion in my ef- 
forts to get out a word." 

"Didn't you try putting a pebble under your 
tongue?" asked Professor Shannon. 



40 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

"Oh, yes, for some years I was a perambu- 
lating stone quarry; but I want to say right 
here that old Demosthenes didn't know what he 
was talking about. He went down to the sea 
and shouted so as to make himself heard above 
the roar of the waves; it was this that helped 
him. I could always sing; and after I had 
made my first efforts to talk I found that when 
I got out in the woods I could recite poetry, 
that is, if you call the Lady of the Lake poetry. 
Marmion and Douglas was my favorite piece. 
For a while I found it very difficult to get 
started, but once I got out the first few words, 
the swing and rhythm of it carried me along. 
I indulged in this exercise very frequently and 
found that it helped me more than anything 
else. That's all I know about my case, except 
that I've no Adam's Apple and it seems to me 
that there is something wrong with my vocal 
cords." 

"No," said Dr. Studevan, "from what you 
tell me, I judge that the trouble was purely 
cerebral." 



A Diagnosis 41 

''Well, just feel of my throat, Doctor; it is 
not like other men's throats." 

"Why, yes, Judge, I find that your throat is 
all right. Here is the Adam's Apple. It is lo- 
cated just a little higher than usual and it is 
covered by this fat on your neck. Your voice 
is strong and resonant and the fact that you 
could sing during your period of dumbness is 
evidence enough that your vocal organs were 
intact. Did you ever use tobacco, Judge?" 

"Yes, I attempted to chew once, but I swal- 
lowed the whole thing and in a few minutes 
I was trying to pull the tacks out of my shoes ; 
but I have always smoked; in fact, between 
the ages of sixteen and twenty-three I was a 
heavy smoker. But after I began to talk I 
found that one cigar increased my difficulty in 
speaking fully fifty per cent, and that two 
cigars smoked in succession rendered it almost 
impossible for me to talk for several hours, and 
I felt the effects for many days." 

"How about drink?" 

"That had just the opposite effect; I have al- 
ways taken a glass of whiskey on occasion and 



42 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

I have found that it rather helped me than 
otherwise/' 

"All this confirms my diagnosis. The trou- 
ble was certainly cerebral. " 

"Doctor, my brain was all right," insisted the 
Judge, "I could understand things as well as 
anybody else. It was only the machinery of 
expression that was out of order." 

"I grant that, but it was the cerebral part of 
the machinery and not the peripheral organs." 

"How do you explain the case ?" asked Miss 
Ruth. 

"That is a long story and it is very difficult 
to strip it of technicalities. Moreover, any de- 
tailed explanation involves matters that are 
more or less speculative. The complex muscu- 
lature of speech in all right-handed persons is 
under the control of a group of nerve cells in 
the third left frontal convolution of the brain. 
These cells in turn are governed by cells in 
the temporal lobe, which underlie all our con- 
sciousness of sound, or by cells in the back of 
the brain that underlie our consciousness of 
vision. 



A Diagnosis 43 

"When we read, the visual image of the word 
rests on a set of nerve currents in the occipital 
lobe in the back of the brain. These currents 
flow out along definite nerve paths to the 
speech-center and there discharge the appropri- 
ate nerve cells. When we are speaking from 
the memory of the sounds of words, it is the 
cells in the temporal lobe that control the speech 
center. 

"The little boy, I take it, was of a highly 
nervous type. His nervousness was probably 
accentuated by the accident on the stage, and 
when the teacher dealt with him so roughly, 
the nerve tension rose above the normal limit, 
and overflowed the normal channels, so that 
the currents failed to reach the speech-center in 
the proper co-ordinatioa to govern the vocal 
organs. 

"The high emotional state induced by the 
novelty of his surroundings on his first day in 
school probably added to the difficulty; but all 
this would likely have passed off without doing 
much permanent harm were it not for the fright 
that resulted from his futile attempts to talk. 



44 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

He had no understanding of what was the 
matter with him and, on being suddenly struck 
dumb, fear took possession of his little soul. 
This fear was further increased by his subse- 
quent futile attempts to explain the matter to 
his brothers and sisters and to his father, and, 
coupled with his failures, it was burned into his 
brain by nerve currents of extremely high ten- 
sion. The result of all this was a permanent 
brain impression that continued to exert an 
inhibitory influence on all his subsequent at- 
tempts to speak." 



CHAPTER III 
The Mental Record 

"There is some direct relation between the 
emotional tension and the permamency of the 
mental record/' said the Doctor. "Our earliest 
remembered impressions are usually the result 
of some exceptionally high emotional state, 
such as the Judge's clearly defined picture of 
the happenings on the stage that night when 
he was scarcely four years old. 

"What is the first thing you remember, Miss 
Ruth?" 

"My earliest impression," replied Miss Ruth, 
"was of the first and only spanking I ever got. 
My mother went down town one day and be- 
fore going she cautioned me not to leave the 
house under any circumstances until she should 
return. Now, I had a Tom Sawyer sweet- 
heart living next door who came for me shortly 
after mother left, and he insisted that I should 



46 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

go with him to his attic to see a wonderful 
old clock that he had unearthed. I thought I 
would be back before my mother got home, but 
missed my calculations and mother gave me a 
good spanking for my disobedience. 

"I was filled with anger, but my predominant 
feeling was one of disgust. I was ashamed of 
my mother and was quite overcome by the 
thought that she should treat her little girl in 
that way. It took me a long time to get back 
my respect for her. She must have seen that 
the effect of the whipping was bad, for she 
never repeated the experiment. I was not quite 
three years old, but I remember all the details 
of those few hours as vividly as if it were but 
yesterday. I have no recollection of anything 
else that occurred for nearly a year afterwards." 

"How careful parents should be of the im- 
pressions made on children in their emotional 
moments," said Mrs. O'Brien, "if the record 
becomes so permanent." 

"Teachers, even more than parents, should 
bear that truth in mind," said Miss Ruth, 
"since its obverse shows how little value is to be 



The Mental Record 47 

attached to the cold, routine teaching of chil- 
dren." 

"You are quite right," said the Doctor, "it is 
true at all times in life, but particulalry in child- 
hood, that all permanent impressions are made 
in a large solvent of feeling." 

"That provides a good justification for cor- 
poral punishment," said the Professor. "Asso- 
ciate disagreeable impressions with a large 
solvent of feeling generated by the birch and 
attach these to wrong conduct and you cure the 
child's budding tendency to crime." 

"Recent vital statistics," said the Judge, 
"show that there has been a very marked in- 
crease in juvenile crime in recent years since 
corporal punishment went out of fashion in 
our schools, but I never thought of connecting 
the two things. 

"Do you really think, Doctor, that it would 
be well to return to corporal punishment?" 

"No, I am a very decided opponent of cor- 
poral punishment, nor can I believe that the 
Professor is so benighted as to advocate a re- 
turn to the birch. The whole spirit of the 
Christian religion is away from the govern- 



48 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

ment of conduct through inhibitions. It is no 
longer Thou shalt not/ but Thou shalt.' 

"Civilization is one long record of the failure 
of punishments as deterrents of crime. In the 
ancient days every time a traitor was drawn 
and quartered and his head placed on the city 
gate, treason multiplied within the walls. Ex- 
perience has proved that public executions are 
demoralizing and, in the interests of morality, 
they are suppressed in most states. It is 
worthy of notice, too, that the few states of the 
union in which capital punishment no longer 
exists have a lower percentage of murders than 
any of the states that inflict capital punishment 
for this crime. 

"But to return to the home and the school- 
room. We should make use of the emotional 
states of children to build up in their lives last- 
ing impressions of noble conduct, right living, 
and high ideals. Childhood, at least, should 
be saved from contact with wickedness and 
from the necessity of inhibitory impressions." 

"Doctor, is stammering usually caused by 
some occurrence similar to that in my father's 
case?" asked Miss Russell. 



The Mental Record 49 

"Yes, in a measure, I take your father's case 
to be typical. It is somewhat extreme, of 
course. The circumstances vary, and the de- 
grees of injury vary, but the underlying causes 
are, for the most part, much the same. It is 
fear that he is going to stammer that makes the 
stammerer stammer. Sometimes, however, 
the first stammering is produced by the child's 
inordinate haste to deliver himself of his pent- 
up feelings, and the case grows aggravated by 
repetition and by the added fear on the part of 
the child that he is going to stammer. 

"This phenomenon, however, is not confined 
to stammerers; something very analogous is 
responsible for much of the stupidity and dull- 
ness in those pupils of whom we hear teachers 
so constantly complain. The worst effect of 
failure in any line is not the immediate effect 
but the permanent memory of failure, which 
for years blocks the way to subsequent success. 
Will you not tell us of your dull girl, Miss Rus- 
sell? I shall be surprised if we do not find 
that there are some of the same elements in 
the case." 

"From your explanation of my father's case, 



50 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

Doctor, I think I am beginning to understand 
what was the matter with Agnes. When she 
came to me a year ago, she had just passed into 
the seventh grade. She was fourteen years 
old, large for her age, and fond of out-door 
sports. She was her father's chum and could 
throw a ball, drive a colt, or paddle a canoe as 
well as any boy. But in the schoolroom her 
mind worked slowly; she had no confidence in 
her mental powers ; her expression was dull, I 
used to think it sullen. She caused me much 
trouble by her fits of stubbornness. When 
called upon to recite at these times, her answer 
was invariably, 'I don't know.' When I in- 
sisted upon her attempting to talk upon the 
subject under consideration, she stood in sullen 
silence and the most I could get from her was, 
'yes, no,' or 'I don't know.' When I persisted 
in my attempts to get from her some expression 
of original thought, or even a repetition of the 
words of the author or of another pupil, she 
grew tense and white about the mouth. But I 
stupidly thought that she was stubbornly re- 
sisting my attempt to get her to do what she 
was determined not to do. 



The Mental Record 51 

"On one of these occasions I said to her, in 
desperation : ' Agnes, open your book and read 
aloud what the author says.' She looked at 
the printed page for some time without utter- 
ing a word, and I wondered what she would do 
next. Finally, the words came with an explo- 
sion that revealed the effort it required to 
bring them forth, and I was overwhelmed with 
remorse for my rash judgment and for my un- 
intentional cruelty. 

"From the explanation that you have given 
of my father's case, I am inclined to think that 
Agnes's vocal chords were paralyzed by stage 
fright. She knew that in the schoolroom she 
was slow; and she believed herself stupid be- 
cause she could not always understand the les- 
son and she could not learn it unless she under- 
stood it. She admitted to me afterwards, in a 
burst of confidence, that she never really ex- 
pected to learn her lesson when she sat down to 
it ; and that when called upon to recite she was 
unable to speak. The recitation period was for 
her one long-drawn-out torture in which she 
endured without protest or explanation, the 
agonies of failure and humiliation." 



52 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

"I have come to think," said Miss Ruth, 
"that the 'I don't know/ of the dull pupil often 
means 'I was not quite sure about that when I 
came to class and your calling upon me has 
frightened away every idea I had on the sub- 
ject; I really can't think when you and the 
class are looking at me.' 

"Indeed, my own college experience fur- 
nished an absurd illustration of this phase of 
school life. I felt myself weak in physics and 
I still stand in awe of the Sister who taught it 
— a most harmless, kindly woman in herself. 
She had the unpedagogical habit of first calling 
upon the student who was to talk and then ask- 
ing the question or announcing the topic. 
When she said, 'Miss Ruth/ consternation 
seized me. Knowing no earthly power would 
help me, I raised my mind and heart to heaven 
in prayer, and having got my mind off myself, 
was able to set it to work when the Sister 
ceased talking." 



CHAPTER IV 

Causes of Dullness in Children 

"Dr. Studevan," said Mrs. O'Brien, "didn't 
you say last Friday evening that frightening 
children made them stupid? Miles says that 
I was mistaken and that you meant something 
entirely different." 

"I don't remember my exact words, Mrs. 
O'Brien, but what I meant was that allowing 
children to fail in the tasks set for them at 
school is often responsible, in large measure, 
for their subsequent dullness, and this is par- 
ticularly true when the children are whipped or 
frightened or ridiculed on account of their 
failure. The high emotional state in these 
cases deepens the impression made by the fail- 
ure and renders it more effective in prevent- 
ing subsequent success. Every horse trainer 
knows this very well. In breaking a young 
colt he is careful never to hitch him to a load 



54 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

that he can't pull. And if the colt happens, by 
some mistake, to be hitched to a load that is too 
heavy, instead of whipping him, he soothes 
him and unhitches him. When a green hand 
adopts the opposite course he makes the colt 
balky and the more he beats him the more 
balky he becomes. I remember once seeing a 
brutal man build a fire under a balky horse, but 
instead of going the horse lay down on the fire 
and quenched it. The balky horse simply can 
not pull. The memory of his past failures pre- 
vents him from liberating the nerve energy re- 
quired to move his muscles. 

"Of course there are many profound differ- 
ences between horses and children, but we are 
here dealing with a fundamental law of phys- 
iology that holds for children and for men as 
rigidly as it holds for horses. It is made man- 
ifest in the difference between a defeated and a 
victorious army. Every general knows that 
victory adds to the power of his army, even 
though it has cost heavily in men and ammuni- 
tion. The experience of every day brings 
home to us the fact that we rarely succeed in 
doing anything that we believe we can not do. 



Causes of Dullness in Children 55 

Faith in ourselves is one of the indispensable 
conditions of success." 

"I have always thought," said the Judge, 
"that heredity had a great deal to do with stu- 
pidity. The children of some families are all 
bright, whereas the children of other families 
are, sometimes, all stupid." 

"That doesn't always follow, Papa, there are 
five of the McKinnen children in our school. 
Annie is the brightest girl in her class, but the 
other four are the trial of their teachers. They 
have been among the left-overs in each grade." 

"And then look at the negro children," said 
Professor Shannon, "it is generally admitted 
that even the brightest of them lack the power 
of sustained attention possessed by white chil- 
dren." 

"On the other hand," said Miss Ruth, "it is 
frequently observed that the children of gen- 
iuses seldom amount to anything. With a few 
exceptions, such as the Herschels, father and 
son, the children of great men are never heard 
of. How is this to be accounted for if bright- 
ness or dullness is due to heredity?" 

"Halleck would seem to make brightness or 



56 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

dullness the result of brain nutrition," said 
Miss Russell. "He says that if a person lives 
on a skim-milk diet, he will think skim-milk 
thoughts, and that the nation proverbially 
known as beef eaters has furnished the world 
the greatest literature of all time." 

"If we are looking for the causes of stupid- 
ity," said Mr. O'Brien, "would it not be well 
to keep in mind laziness, sheer, downright lazi- 
ness?" 

"Laziness itself needs to be accounted for 
quite as much as stupidity," said Dr. Studevan. 
"I don't think we can admit it among the pri- 
mary causes of stupidity." 

"In my experience," said Miss Ruth, "de- 
fective sense organs, particularly defective 
sight and hearing, are frequently responsible 
for the backwardness of pupils." 

"Is not sickness often responsible for chil- 
dren's dullness?" asked Mrs. O'Brien. 

"Yes," said Dr. Studevan, "and we might as 
well add two more to those five causes of stu- 
pidity and so complete the list of capital sins; 
unfavorable environment and alternating 
phases of physical and mental development. 
If we would understand and remedy any case 



Causes of Dullness in Children 57 

of stupidity the first step must be to gain a 
clear understanding of its cause or causes. 
Each case has its individual history and until 
this is mastered we are blundering in the 
dark." 

"I was as much surprised," said Professor 
Shannon, "as any of you by the references 
which the Judge and the Doctor made to their 
own boyhood, but I took it for granted that 
they were coloring matters a bit, or at least that 
their cases were very rare, until I found this 
article in the Brooklyn Eagle last Sunday. It is 
astonishing how many idiots we have amongst 
us. Just listen to this: 'A statement was re- 
cently made by Dr. Maxwell to the effect that 
of the 536,000 pupils of New York City's pub- 
lic schools no less than 200,000 were abnormal- 
ly old for the classes in which they were study- 
in*.' " 

"Why, is it possible," exclaimed Mrs. 
O'Brien, "that nearly half of the children of 
New York are defectives?" 

"No, it is not quite as bad as that," replied 
Professor Shannon. "The article goes on to 
state that a large part of this is due to the fact 



58 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

that foreign-born children are graded in the 
New York schools according to their ability to 
speak the English language. But, after due al- 
lowance is made for this, it seems that the num- 
ber of children with whom there is something 
wrong is very large. 

"Dr. Groszmann, who is conducting a school 
in New Jersey for atypical children, says : 'The 
term atypical children has been greatly mis- 
used. It has been improperly applied to ab- 
normal and feeble-minded children indiscrimi- 
nately. The atypical child proper deviates 
from the average human type to a greater or 
less degree. It does not necessarily mean be- 
cause a child is atypical that its capabilities are 
not so well developed as those of normal chil- 
dren. Frequently it is over-stimulation and 
precocity that are the causes of the child's 
atypic condition. Neurotic and neurasthenic 
children become atypic, and their nervousness 
is often hereditary. Other causes of atypical 
conditions are irritability, perverse tendencies, 
fears and mental disturbances. Another class 
of atypical children are those of retarded men- 
tal or physical development, and sometimes 



Causes of Dullness in Children 59 

both. Through neglect these atypical children 
may become permanently defective or morally 
perverse. Another division consists of chil- 
dren whose progress in school was hindered by 
a change of schools, a slower rate of develop- 
ment, temporary dullness, or physical difficul- 
ties. Then there are the children of unusually 
rapid development without genuine precocity, 
children who are difficult to manage, mischiev- 
ous and spoiled children. The atypical child 
includes the backward child who is not neces- 
sarily a mentally deficient child. The preco- 
cious child, or the bright child, as we call it, is, 
in reality, over-stimulated, and in a state of 
constant nervous exhaustion. * * * A child 
like this needs expert handling, for a while it 
may be only pseudo atypical, it is very apt to 
become genuinely atypical or may even degen- 
erate into an abnormal child.' " 

"Isn't Dr. Groszmann juggling with techni- 
cal terms?" asked Miss Ruth. "He takes as 
his typical child the average human child. 
Now, every body knows that individual chil- 
dren are very seldom average children, they all 
depart more or less from the type that would be 



6o The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

a sort of composite photograph of the group. 
He might as well make an end of it and say- 
that all children are atypical." 

"He evidently means to include only the 
more pronounced departures from the typical 
child," said Professor Shannon, "for he makes 
the statement elsewhere in the same article that 
in almost every classroom of the public schools 
of Newark there are from six to seven mentally 
deficient children, some of whom are even 
designated as feeble-minded, and he calculates 
that there are at least ten per cent of the chil- 
dren of the New York schools atypical." 

"Isn't that a surprisingly large percentage 
of defective or atypical children, or whatever 
you choose to call them ?" asked Mrs. O'Brien. 
"How can it be accounted for?" 

"The life of a big city like New York," said 
Dr. Studevan, "is very abnormal. The mad 
rush and hurry and the stress of the struggle 
for existence is enough to break down the adult 
mind. The effect of this life is transmitted to 
the nerves and brain of the child. Besides, a 
big city is the worst place in the world in which 
to bring up children." 



Causes of Dullness in Children 61 

"But aren't the public schools doing any- 
thing for these children ?" asked Mrs. O'Brien. 

"Yes," said Dr. Studevan, "there are many 
attempts being made to reach this class of chil- 
dren. In the public school at Chatham Square, 
for instance, they have a special class for them 
under the care of Miss Farrell. Before the 
close of school last June I spent an interesting 
day in her classroom. She is working won- 
ders with children, many of whom would oth- 
erwise find their way into institutions for the 
feeble-minded.* But in Great Britain they 
have progressed much farther with the work 
than we have. In her report to the New York 
School Board, dated December, 1903, Miss 
Farrell gives an excellent account of this move- 
ment in England. The work is some years 
older on the Continent, where the English au- 
thorities sent special teachers to study the situa- 
tion before inaugurating the work for these 
children at home. The work was begun in 
London in 1892. Ten years later there were 



*Since this was written, work similar to that referred 
to in the public school at Chatham Square is being 
carried on in several of the New York schools under 
the supervision of Miss Farrell. 



62 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

in the Metropolitan district of London alone, 
fifty centers each having from one to five classes 
with a total of 2,359 children under instruction. 
By an act of Parliament in 1899 this has be- 
come a regular feature of the elementary 
schools of the kingdom. An examination of 
the pupils gathered into these special classes 
brings out the fact that the defects are largely 
due to physical causes. Neurosis, St. Vitus's 
dance, infantile paralysis, epilepsy, tuberculosis, 
and other forms of hereditary disease, are 
everywhere in evidence. The thin arms and 
legs, the pinched, old-looking faces, and the 
large joints of these anaemic children all point 
to inherited disease, to malnutrition, and a 
vitiated atmosphere. The evidences of sin and 
poverty and ignorance are everywhere mingled 
with more or less pronounced marks of mental 
deficiency.' 

"In the University of Pennsylvania there was 
started some ten years ago a movement which 
seems full of promise for the solution of this 
problem. Dr. Lightner Witmer, of the De- 
partment of Psychology, has taken up the work 
in a very scientific way. In March, 1907, he 



Causes of Dullness in Children 63 

began the publication of a periodical entitled 
The Psychological Clinic, a Journal for the 
Study and Treatment of Mental Retardation 
and Deviation. The Doctor advocates 'the 
training of students for a new profession — that 
of the psychological expert, who should find his 
career in connection with the school system, 
through the examination and treatment of men- 
tally and morally retarded children, or in con- 
nection with the practice of medicine/ 

"I received the first number of the Psycho- 
logical Clinic yesterday and brought it with me, 
feeling that you would all like to examine its 
contents. Let me read a few paragraphs from 
the pen of Dr. Witmer in the leading article of 
this number: 'During the last ten years the 
laboratory of Psychology at the University of 
Pennsylvania has conducted under my direc- 
tion, what I have called "a psychological clin- 
ic." Children from the public schools of Phila- 
delphia and adjacent cities have been brought 
to the laboratory by parents or teachers ; these 
children had made themselves conspicuous be- 
cause of an inability to progress in school work 
as rapidly as other children, or because of mor- 



64 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

al defects which rendered them difficult to man- 
age under ordinary discipline. When brought 
to the psychological clinic, such children are 
given a physical and mental examination ; if the 
result of this examination shows it to be desir- 
able, they are then sent to specialists for the eye 
or the ear, for the nose or throat, and for nerv- 
ous diseases, one or all, as each case may re- 
quire. The result of this conjoint medical and 
psychological examination is a diagnosis of 
the child's mental and physical condition and 
the recommendation of appropriate medical 
and pedagogical treatment. The progress of 
some of these children has been followed for a 
term of years.' 

"The paper contains an account of a number 
of very interesting cases. The Doctor gives 
an account of the case which led to the estab- 
lishment of the psychological clinic. 'The sec- 
ond case to attract my interest was a boy of 
fourteen years of age, who was brought to the 
laboratory of Psychology by his grade teacher. 
He was one of those children of great interest 
to the teacher, known to the profession as a 



Causes of Dullness in Children 65 

chronic bad speller. His teacher, Miss Marga- 
ret T. Maguire, now supervising principal of a 
grammar school of Philadelphia, was at that 
time a student of psychology at the University 
of; Pennsylvania ; she was imbued with the idea 
that a psychologist should be able through ex- 
amination, to ascertain the causes of a deficien- 
cy in spelling and to recommend the appro- 
priate treatment for its amelioration or cure. 
With this case, in March, 1896, the work of the 
psychological clinic was begun. * * * In the 
Spring of 1896, I saw several other cases of 
children suffering from the retardation of some 
special function, like that of spelling, or from 
general retardation, and I undertook the train- 
ing of these children for a certain number of 
hours each week. * * * In addition to lecture 
and laboratory courses in experimental and 
physiological psychology, a course in child 
psychology was given to demonstrate the 
various methods of child psychology, but espec- 
ially the clinical method. * * * At the clinic 
cases were presented of children suffering from 
defects of the eye, ear, deficiency in motor abil- 
ity, or in memory and attention; and in the 



66 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

training school, children were taught through- 
out the session of the summer school, receiving 
pedagogical treatment for the cure of stammer- 
ing and other speech defects, for defects of 
written language (such as bad spelling), and 
for motor defects.' 

"This work of Dr. Witmer's seems to me 
to hold out the promise of great help to the 
dull and backward children that have been mul- 
tiplying so rapidly in our schools." 

"These children," said Mrs. O'Brien, "al- 
ways seemed so far away from us, and I have 
always felt so hopeless about them, but if Dr. 
Studevan and the Judge, through mistakes of 
their parents and teachers, were classed with 
them, is it not possible that many of these chil- 
dren are there by mistake also? I am more 
curious than ever to hear Dr. Studevan's ac- 
count of his own boyhood. Won't you please 
tell us what you remember of it, Doctor?" 

"We will keep Professor Shannon still," 
said Mr. O'Brien, "and see that no one inter- 
rupts you while you are giving us the auto- 
biography of "Studevan's omadhaun." I saw a 
statement the other day to the effect that Dr. 



Causes of Dullness in Children 67 

Joseph Wright, Professor of Comparative Phil- 
ology at Oxford, was a mill hand at the age of 
sixteen and unable to read. To-day he is one 
of the most learned men in England. I would 
give a good deal for his autobiography to add 
to those of the Judge and Dr. Studevan." 



CHAPTER V 

Alternating Phases of Physical and Menial 
Development 

"My case seems very simple to me now," 
said Dr. Studevan, "but it puzzled me for many 
years. It was only an exaggerated form of 
what may frequently be found in every school- 
room in the land. Perhaps it will simplify 
matters if, at the outset, we eliminate a num- 
ber of the usual causes of stupidity which had 
no place in my boyhood. 

"Heredity was entirely in my favor. I come 
of a long-lived, healthy, fecund race. My par- 
ents and grandparents reached more than the 
allotted four score years. I have been unable 
to find any trace of hereditary disease in any 
branch of the family. My ancestors, as far 
back as I can trace them, were well-to-do far- 
mers. They were pious, practical Catholics 
who felt that the greatest blessing God could 
bestow upon them was to call a son to the 
priesthood or a daughter to the convent. 



Alternating Phases of Development 69 

"The physical environment of my childhood 
and youth was all that could be desired. I was 
born and raised on a large farm in one of the 
most picturesque spots in the park region of 
Minnesota. The air was pure and invigorat- 
ing, the soil wonderfully fertile and the scenery 
beautiful. With the changing seasons there 
was a great variety of occupations in all of 
which we kept very close to nature and gener- 
ated excellent appetites which were appeased 
five times a day by an abundance of wholesome 
food. 

"My mother was an excellent cook. Her 
table linen was always immaculate. I have 
never since tasted such bread and butter as she 
made. There was poultry and fresh eggs and 
home-made- preserves in abundance all the year 
round. Three times a day the table was served 
with fresh fruits and vegetables in season from 
our own garden, with beef or mutton of our 
own raising, or home-cured ham and bacon. 
A bulging lunch basket was sent out to us in 
the fields every day at ten and at four o'clock. 
Fresh milk was our usual beverage. Every 
evening from the time I was eight years old un- 
til I was sixteen, on finishing my share of the 



yo The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

milking, I used to drain a brimming quart of 
warm milk, a habit, which linked with my ap- 
pearance, perhaps, earned for me the sobri- 
quet of 'over-grown calf.' 

"My health was excellent. Except for the 
usual siege of measles and whooping cough I 
do not believe that I was a day ill during the 
first twenty years of my life. My senses were 
normal. I was not a timid child and I do not 
remember that I was ever frightened, or that I 
suffered from any accident that would account 
for my period of dullness ; and no one has ever 
accused me of being lazy. 

"So that of the seven causes of dullness 
enumerated above, six, namely, heredity, dis- 
ease, environment,' malnutrition, defective 
senses, and fright, are clearly eliminated. My 
case is thus a peculiarly fortunate one in which 
to study the dullness that arises from alternat- 
ing phases of physical and mental develop- 
ment." 

"If you will pardon the interruption, Doc- 
tor," said the Judge, "I would like to ask a 
question. I don't mind admitting my ignor- 
ance of physiology, and I should like to know 



Alternating Phases of Development 71 

just what you mean by the alternating phases 
of physical and mental development." 

"A full explanation of this physiological 
phenomenon, Judge, would involve a treatise 
on the physiology of the nervous system, but 
stripped of technicalities the important facts in 
the case are these. All vital functions are con- 
trolled by nerve currents. The quality and 
quantity of every secretion, as well as body 
temperature, respiration, and the circulation of 
the blood, depend upon appropriate nerve cur- 
rents. And not only this, but the nutrition 
and growth of every organ and gland, of every 
cell in the body, are dependent upon the same 
source. A broken bone, for instance, if it be 
deprived of its proper nerve supply, will never 
heal. 

"On the other hand, the process of mental 
development, as indeed all the phenomena of 
consciousness, rest upon high tension nerve 
currents in the cerebral cortex. Now, it fre- 
quently happens that a boy or girl grows very 
rapidly for a few years, during which period 
the physical organism makes such demands 
upon the nerve energy that the cortical tension 



J2 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

is lowered and there is not sufficient nerve en- 
ergy left to carry on the work of rapid mental 
development. 

"We all know how injurious it is, for exam- 
ple, to indulge in mental work immediately af- 
ter eating a hearty meal. When food enters 
the stomach it originates nerve impulses that 
draw the blood away from the brain for use 
in the processes of digestion. If brain activity- 
be indulged in at this time, the blood is with- 
drawn from the viscera and forced into the 
brain under an increased pressure to furnish 
the required nerve energy and thus the diges- 
tive process is delayed and sometimes the di- 
gestive apparatus itself is injured. 

"Now, we have a similar conflict going on 
between mental and physical development. It 
seldom happens that during childhood and 
youth the balance is preserved between the 
growth and development of the body and the 
growth and development of the mental proc- 
esses. The extent to which this balance is 
disturbed and the length of time that each 
phase contiues varies within wide limits." 



CHAPTER VI 
The Atypical Child in School 

"If you exclude the children who have be- 
come dullards through any one of the six 
causes just enumerated, and arrange the chil- 
dren in any third or fourth grade room in ac- 
cordance with their physical development, you 
will find them fairly well classified inversely as 
their mental capacity, that is, the brightest chil- 
dren will be the smallest and the largest chil- 
dren will be the dullest. Here and there puz- 
zling exceptions to this rule will be found, but 
these are not sufficient to obscure the general 
truth. 

"The eagerness and ambition of the smaller 
children, coupled with their quickness of move- 
ment, indicate high cortical tension. If these 
children are constantly over stimulated, as fre- 
quently happens, their physical development 
may be retarded for some years. In extreme 
cases they are to be found among those chil- 
dren whom over-fond mothers are in the habit 



74 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

of regarding as too bright or too good for this 
world. Less aggravated cases not infrequent- 
ly result in permanent invalidism. This is 
particularly true of girls when the period of 
over stimulation is carried beyond the twelfth 
or the fourteenth year. If these precocious lit- 
tle ones escape disease and death from over 
stimulation they will finally reach a time in 
which the balance swings in the opposite direc- 
tion and physical development, so long re- 
tarded, sets in with unusual rapidity. The en- 
suing mental phase is characterized by lack of 
energy which to the uninstructed is pure lazi- 
ness. 

"If the pupils are at this time entrusted to 
incompetent teachers the discouragement into 
which they fall is likely to degenerate into per- 
manent dullness from which they make no 
further effort to escape. And thus it happens 
that precocious children are seldom heard from 
in after life. I am quite convinced, however, 
that when the precociousness is not due to in- 
herited or acquired disease this result may be 
prevented by competent teachers. But in the 



The Atypical Child in School 75 

present condition of our schools the chances of 
permanent success are much better where the 
physical development of the child is in the 
ascendant during the early years of school life. 
Here the danger to health from over stimula- 
tion is avoided and when at last the processes 
of physical development begin to slow up, if 
the discouragement is not too deep, mental life 
may awaken to a new vigor. 

"Either extreme, however, is difficult to man- 
age and may prove dangerous in the hands of 
incompetent or careless teachers. A balance 
between the two processes of development is 
the safest and may be considered the condition 
of typical children. The development of these 
children should accordingly determine the work 
of the grade and their condition should form 
the ideal towards which the teacher should con- 
santly strive to lead the developmental pro- 
cesses in the atypical children." 

"The atypical children," said Miss Ruth, 
"are the cause of most of the difficulty in every 
schoolroom. If the children could all be made 
typical by any treatment of the teacher, there 
would be no hesitancy on her part to apply the 



j6 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

treatment. But even prescinding from the 
children whose condition is traceable to disease 
or malnutrition, what can the teacher do for 
these cases of unbalanced developmental ten- 
dencies?" 

"Where there is no other complication, she 
can keep these precocious children from injur- 
ing their health by over work and she can save 
Doth the undersized precocious children and the 
overgrown dull children from permanent dull- 
ness. Once she understands the case her meth- 
od of treatment is perfectly clear. The preco- 
cious child must be guarded against over stim- 
ulation and the dull pupil must be kept from 
discouragement." 

"Do you mean," asked Miss Russell, "that 
the brighter pupils should be retarded in their 
progress so that the dull ones may not be dis- 
couraged? Is the encouragement of the dull 
pupil, rather than the strict exercise of justice, 
the first duty of the teacher? Of course justice 
demands that encouragement be given to the 
less bright, but does it not also require that dis- 
couragement be not given to the brighter 
pupils?" 



The Atypical Child in School JJ~ 

"These are far-reaching questions/' replied 
the Doctor. "I shall endeavor to answer them 
somewhat more fully at another time in connec- 
tion with concrete cases. Here I merely wish 
to register a protest against two procedures 
which frequently obtain in our schools. Some 
teachers insist that the instruction and the work 
of the room should be measured by the capacity 
of the dullest pupils, while a still larger num- 
ber of teachers fit the work to the needs of 
the majority. The motto of the teacher should 
not be the greatest good of the greatest num- 
ber but the greatest good of the whole num- 
ber. 

"I do not see that the interests of any of the 
children concerned are sacrificed by the method 
of treatment which I have just proposed. The 
best interests of the very bright pupils are 
not served by pushing them up through the 
grades as rapidly as possible. Where this is 
done it is difficult to avoid over stimulation 
and when, at a later time, the physical 
development of these children sets in, it 
is quite impossible to save them from discour- 



yS The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

agement. They are too far along in their 
course and now find themselves unable to keep 
pace with their little classmates. The defeat 
and humiliation resulting from their failure 
are likely to prove a permanent hindrance to 
their further mental development. Of course 
it will not do to let the bright children culti- 
vate habits of idleness, but the resourceful 
teacher will find little difficulty in keeping these 
children busy with collateral work. The pre- 
cocious children will thus lay up treasures 
against the day of need. 

"The dull pupils must not be given tasks 
above their present ability and the competent 
teacher will do everything in her power to 
encourage and to stimulate them and to 
awaken their interest in the subjects taught. 
She will be particularly careful to avoid hu- 
miliating them by putting them into compe- 
tition with children who are, for the time be- 
ing, their superiors mentally. In this way in- 
justice is done to no pupil and the interests 
of all are safeguarded." 

"I thank you, Doctor," said the Judge, "for 



The Atypical Child in School 79 

your explanation of these unbalanced develop- 
mental tendencies, but I am afraid that the 
ladies will not forgive me for diverting you 
from the story of your boyhood." 

"That story will keep for another time," re- 
plied the Doctor. "It is too late to begin on 
it tonight." 



CHAPTER VII 
Early Memory Pictures 

"You were never more welcome, Doctor," 
said Mr. O'Brien. "We had begun to fear 
that you would desert us tonight. Come, take 
this chair. The glowing embers will stimu- 
late your imagination and help to bring back 
the scenes of your childhood, in which we 
have all grown deeply interested. Dido's court 
was not more attentive to Aeneas describing 
the fall of Troy than will be your audience 
tonight if you will tell us, as you have prom- 
ised to do, how you came to be known as an 
omadhaun and how you were rescued from 
permanent imbecility." 

"That task is soon accomplished," replied the 
Doctor. "I was known as an omadhaun from 
the age of nine to seventeen because I was an 
omadhaun during those years; and of all peo- 



Early Memory Pictures 81 

pie in the world an omadhaun is the least 
able to conceal his mental condition. And as 
to my 'rescue', that hardly describes the oc- 
currence; I simply grew out of the condition." 

"Oh, please, Doctor," said Miss Russell, 
"tell us about your childhood. You know you 
promised to give us all the details of your case, 
and I have been simply consumed with curi- 
osity for the last two weeks." 

"I, too, ■ have been looking forward to this 
evening," said Miss Ruth. "The child has 
come to be the center of all educational en- 
deavor in our day, hence it is a matter of the 
greatest importance to all of us who have to 
deal with children to be able to understand 
how the child looks out upon the world, to 
recognize the elements in his developing mind 
and character that are valuable and that should 
be cultivated, and also to be able to recognize 
those other elements which we should as con- 
stantly seek to eliminate." 

"I quite agree with you," said the Doctor, 
"and while it has become the fashion for teach- 
ers to read many volumes on child study, I 



82 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

believe that every teacher could use some of 
this time to greater advantage in making ex- 
cursions into his own childhood. If he learns 
to read and understand all that he there finds 
he will be provided with a private key that 
will give him ready admission to the minds and 
hearts of the children who are committed to 
his care. 

"I am not at all disposed to slip away from 
telling the story of my childhood, but after I 
have served up my own childhood and youth 
and dissected them and demonstrated to you 
the making and the unmaking of a dullard, I 
shall exact a similar accounting from the 
other members of this group. The chief in- 
terest in my case comes from the fact that the 
dullards are usually the greatest trial of every 
teacher. We must not, however, make the 
mistake of supposing that a study of the dul- 
lard will provide us with a full understand- 
ing of the more normal types of children." 

"The story, Studevan, the story," said Pro- 
fessor Shannon. 

"Yes, let's have the story," said Mr. 



Early Memory Pictures 83 

O'Brien, "and we shall do the philosophizing 
afterward." 

"As far as I can discover, my childhood up 
to my ninth year differed from that of other 
children in no important respect/' said the 
Doctor. "There are a few incidents in it, how- 
ever, which have helped me to understand the 
later developments. As the waters of oblivion 
gradually creep up over our childhood, a few 
of the higher peaks of experience remain above 
the waves. These islands are very interesting 
to all students of child nature for they are 
frequently filled with treasures. Just as the 
islands out from the mainland preserve for us 
a record of the fauna and flora that flour- 
ished before the islands became separated from 
the mainland, so these isolated memories of 
childhood frequently reveal to us early atti- 
tudes of mind and early tendencies which it 
is not possible to obtain anywhere else in an 
unmodified form. This is well illustrated in 
the brief life of St. Thomas which is given in 
the second nocturn for his feast. 

"The biographer of the saint tells us that 



84 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

while he was still an infant in arms he found 
a piece of parchment on which was written the 
Hail Mary. The child clutched it in his little 
hand and would not relinquish it to the nurse, 
and when his mother took it away from him 
by force he became so convulsed with sobs and 
tears that she was obliged to return it to him, 
whereupon he immediately swallowed it. The 
same biographer tells us that while the saint 
was in his early teens he joined the Dominican 
order against the wishes of his family. His 
superiors sent him with another Brother to 
Paris to complete his studies. His family 
waylaid him on his journey through Italy and 
imprisoned him in one of their castles. Here 
they resorted to every conceivable means of di- 
verting him from his purpose but without 
avail. The biographer finds in the first of these 
incidents an indication of the saint's future 
love and devotion to the Mother of God, and 
in the latter incident he finds a triumph of 
grace so great that it earned for the saint 
permanent immunity from certain forms of 
temptation. 



Early Memory Pictures 85 

"One need not deny the operations of grace 
in these incidents and yet find in them natural 
indications of the saint's character. Had he 
been an ordinary child his behavior might ap- 
pear to many as an indication of bad temper, 
and his determined opposition to the wishes of 
his family in any one but a saint would prob- 
ably be considered a manifestation of self-will 
and stubborness. In any case, the incidents 
show the child and the youth to be possessed 
of a strong will and a determined character, 
two qualities that, after the operations of di- 
vine grace, are probably responsible in no small 
measure for the saint's greatness. 

"I only remember two incidents in my own 
life before I was six years old. And neither 
of these, I am sorry to say, offers any discov- 
erable indication of future sanctity. When I 
was three years and ten months old our family 
moved three or four miles to a neighboring 
farm. Many of the incidents of that moving 
come to me now as if they took place but yes- 
terday. I can see the kitchen in the old house 
as it appeared to me on leaving it that morn- 



86 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

ing. The empty wood box was in its place 
behind the stove; the plaster was knocked off 
the wall just above it. Outside the door there 
was a broad step, at one end of which was an 
inverted broken shovel that had served for 
many years in scraping the mud from the fam- 
ily shoes. 

"There was a light snow on the ground. In 
the front yard there was a mule team hitched 
to a wagon that was piled high with furniture 
and boxes; behind this there was an ox team 
hitched to an empty bob-sled. My parents in- 
tended that I should ride in the bob-sled with 
my mother and the younger members of the 
family, but I resisted this with so much an- 
ger, reinforced with kicks and tears" and sobs, 
that I finally obtained my own way and was 
allowed to take my place beside the driver on 
the high seat behind the mule team. 

"In our journey we crossed the railroad 
track and I can still see those two bright bands 
of steel as they seemed to approach each other 
in the distance. I retain a clear memory of my 
feelings as I clung to the back of the seat while 



Early Memory Pictures 87 

the wagon jolted over the frozen ground, and 
of my relief when Jake lifted me down from 
the high seat. My limbs were numb from 
the long cold ride. 

"We entered the front yard through a wicket 
that sagged open on its leather hinges. I can 
still see the pebbles on the path and every de- 
tail of the front room as we entered it. Mr. 
Piper, the former owner, was standing with 
his back to the wall looking up at a pipe pro- 
tector in the ceiling with its circlet of little 
holes. 

"The other incident to which I referred oc- 
curred some eighteen months later. At that 
time I was the proud possessor of two pairs 
of home-made, rusty brown breeches. I re- 
member it was an autumn day and I was keep- 
ing guard over the pair of breeches that 
had just left the wash tub and w T as dry- 
ing on the clothes horse behind the kitchen 
stove. I had determined that my wardrobe 
should not be depleted even to rescue my little 
brother from the ignominy of petticoats. 

"But, alas, courage was never yet a match 



88 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

for woman's wiles. When the garment was 
about dry, one of my sisters promised to mount 
guard for me while the other induced me to 
accompany her to the corn crib where, for half 
an hour, I stood fascinated by the golden ears 
as they came in through the window from my 
father's scoop shovel in showers and rolled 
down the pile of corn. On my return to the 
house I found that I had been basely betrayed ; 
my little brother was strutting around in my 
newly ironed trousers, and my anger rose to 
the breaking point. 

"The trivial details of these memory pic- 
tures are sufficient evidence that we must look 
elsewhere than to the importance of the sub- 
ject matter for the causes of the permanency 
of the mental record. The high emotional ten- 
sion acts as a fixing agent, leaving upon 
the mind an indelible record of all the associ- 
ated images. It is only the strongest qualities 
of character that oppose high resistance and 
thus generate high emotional states. 

"The first of these incidents indicates 
strength of will and perseverance, two traits 



Early Memory Pictures 89 

which are largely responsible for my final 
escape from dullarddom. The betrayal of the 
child's confidence and the invasion of what he 
considered his personal rights were responsible 
for the second memory picture and indicate, 
by the indignation which they aroused in the 
boy, traits of character which are scarcely less 
important." 

"You draw your conclusions so rapidly, 
Doctor," said Miss Ruth, "that I find myself 
unable to keep up with you. If the permanency 
and detail of the first memory picture are due 
to high emotional tension, how are we to ac- 
count for the child's remembering the inci- 
dents of the journey, such as the crossing of 
the railroad, and the incidents at the termina- 
tion of the journey which must have occurred 
some hours later? Yet there is apparently as 
vivid a rememberance of the leather hinges on 
the open wicket, of the pebbles on the path, 
and of Mr. Piper looking up at the ceiling, as 
there is of the wood-box, of the shovel doing 
service as a scraper, or of the two teams before 
the door. Emotional states are notoriously 



90 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

short lived in children. However high the 
child's anger may have mounted when he was 
fighting for his own way, it must have disap- 
peared as rapidly as an April shower when he 
was placed beside the driver." 

"That is all true," replied the Doctor, "and 
had no other high emotional states ensued, the 
memory picture would doubtless have ended 
with his anger as soon as he was placed beside 
the driver. But we must bear in mind that that 
journey was probably the child's first excur- 
sion into the unknown outer world where 
everything was new and strange. He would 
have been unobservant and phlegmatic indeed 
had he remained calm throughout the journey. 

"Besides, there was another element in the 
situation which must not be lost sight of. In 
the old days when we wished to determine 
which pup out of the litter to raise, we used 
to catch each one of them in turn by the scruff 
of the neck and hold it out at arm's length ; the 
pups that squealed were drowned ; the pups that 
had grit enough to keep their mouths shut 
were raised. 



Early Memory Pictures 91 

"Do you remember your emotions the first 
time that you found yourself on some dizzy 
height? Had the child been put up on the 
high seat without having struggled for it, the 
chances are that as soon as the wagon began 
to move, or as soon as the wheels struck the 
first stone, he would have cried out to be 
taken down. But he had committed himself 
and so all his pride was aroused and all the 
strength of will that he possessed was sum- 
moned to control his fear on that long and 
perilous ride. The emotional tension gene- 
rated from these two sources probably re- 
mained high to the end of the journey and thus 
made a permanent record of all the trivial in- 
cidents that occurred." 



CHAPTER VIII 
The Making of a Dullard 

"But to return to my story. I was six years 
and four months old when I entered school for 
the first time. It was a little village school 
having but a single room, one teacher and sixty 
or seventy pupils. 

"I had learned to read at home and was read- 
ing in Wilson's First Reader. I was soon pro- 
moted to Wilson's Second Reader and before 
the end of the year, probably because there 
was only one other pupil in the class, I was pro- 
moted, with my companion, to the National 
Third Reader. The break between these two 
readers was very great. Wilson's Second 
Reader was a simple affair, not much more 
difficult than the primer of the National Series, 
whereas the National Third Reader was made 
up of selections from the English Classics. 



The Making of a Dullard 93 

"This was the first serious mistake that the 
teacher made in my regard. The book was 
altogether too difficult for me. I had little or 
no comprehension of the sub'ject-matter of the 
lesson and the words were frequently too diffi- 
cult for me to pronounce. My hesitating and 
stumbling rapidly developed into what my 
teachers and parents called a 'stoppage in my 
speech.' The humiliation of defeat began to 
settle into a permanent distaste for reading and 
a permanent discouragement concerning my 
ability in that direction. 

"I fared better in the other branches. I knew 
my catechism by heart before 1 was nine years 
old. I could spell and give the synonyms for 
most of the words in Saunders' Speller, and 
I usually maintained my place fairly well in 
the 'spelling down' matches that were a regu- 
lar feature of the school. My work in arith- 
metic was considered good ; I had finished long 
division and was working in fractions before I 
was nine years old. Our geography work, of 
course, consisted in the usual drill of those 
days in bounding states, naming capitals and 



94 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

giving a long series of definitions of geograph- 
ical terms.' ' 

"Oh, I misunderstood you," said Miss Rus- 
sell, "I thought you said the other evening that 
you had to learn the multiplication table when 
you were seventeen years old and that you 
were then unable to read." 

"Perhaps I did say so," replied the Doctor, 
"but if I did, let me modify the statement. I 
had to relearn the multiplication table and re- 
learn to read when I was seventeen. During 
the years that intervened I had practically for- 
gotten everything that I had learned in those 
first three years at school." 

"How did that happen?" asked Mrs. 
O'Brien. "From what you have just told us, 
you must have been as bright as the average 
child up to the time you were nine years old. 
Did you suffer from an accident at that time?" 

"No, there was no accident. My dullness 
came on gradually and I have no distinct re- 
membrance of the stages in the process. Read- 
ing, as I have said, was the only subject in 
which I have a clear remembrance of failure, 



The Making of a Dullard 95 

and that left with me a deep and abiding- sense 
of shame and discouragement. 

"In the closing months of my ninth year I 
remember that the other boys used to tease me 
and play tricks on me and get me into frequent 
fights. I think I must have been growing very 
rapidly during this time and probably ceased 
to make progress in all the school subjects. 

"However this may be, on the completion of 
my ninth year I was kept home from school 
and put to work on the farm. I did not dis- 
cover the reason for this until I was about 
fourteen years old. I was not at all sorry for 
the change, however, as I had grown to dread 
school and to hate it. The fields were far more 
attractive to me. 

"I was given a team to drive and dressed out 
in an over-all suit I felt myself quite a man. 
I used to get up in the manger to put the 
bridles on the horses and I had some difficulty 
in harnessing them. I would give much for a 
series of photographs of myself at that time 
and for a record of my weight and height, but 
unfortunately none of these are available. 



g6 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

"At thirteen years I weighed one hundred 
and sixty pounds ; at fourteen I was my pres- 
ent height, five feet, ten inches. At thirteen I 
was very strong physically; indeed I did a 
man's work in nearly every employment on the 
farm. 

"My nerve energy must have been all used in 
building up my physical frame. The tension 
was so low that there was not even a good 
muscle tonus. I retain a vivid memory picture 
of myself at that time. I was raw-boned and 
lanky; my lower jaw hung down continually; 
the lower lip was heavy and usually sunburned 
during the summer season. I remember my 
difficulty in keeping it covered with the skin 
of an tgg to protect it from the sun and wind. 

"I spoke but seldom, and when I did attempt 
to talk, even the members of my own family 
found some difficulty in understanding me. The 
boys used to mock me so that I grew afraid 
of the sound of my own voice. I would not 
dare attempt to hum or whistle a tune. I was 
taken to church every Sunday but I was shy 
and avoided speaking to any one. 



The Making of a Dullard 97 

"I had practically no boy playmates during 
these years. The neighboring boys frequently 
gathered in our pasture on Sunday afternoons 
to play ball, but I was seldom allowed to take 
part in the game and I was never allowed to 
visit or to go away from home." 

"Didn't you say the other evening," asked 
Miss Ruth, "that you returned to school when 
you were thirteen?" 



CHAPTER IX 
Into the Depths 

"When I was thirteen years old, in slipping 
off a load of hay one day, my foot caught in 
the rack and I was thrown out on my side up 
on the frozen ground. I was not seriously in- 
jured except that my left wrist was dislocated. 
The week following I was sent to school with 
my arm in a sling. My family was anxious 
that I should be prepared for Confirmation and 
they still entertained a lingering hope that I 
might learn enough of the three R's to get 
along on the farm. The teacher was very kind 
to me; she gave me a great deal of individual 
attention and tried during the recesses and 
after school hours to get me started in arith- 
metic. I do not remember that I made much 
progress. 

"One day in the reading class I was trying 
to induce a companion to give me some candy. 



Into the Depths 99 

When he refused I made a gesture that wasn't 
quite nice and I was instantly aware that the 
teacher had seen me. I was ashamed of my- 
self and as sorry as I could be; I was also 
afraid of being punished. It was Friday eve- 
ning and, when I got away from school without 
anything being said, I congratulated myself 
on my fortunate escape and I resolved never 
to do it again. On the following Monday 
morning tL! ^gs went on as usual and I felt 
quite sure that the teacher had decided to over- 
look my offence, but at the noon recreation she 
asked me to remain in my place when she dis- 
missed the other pupils, and then I knew that 
my hope had been vain. 

"She reasoned with me and I suppose she ex- 
pected me to cry, but that wasn't in my line. I 
was silent and hung my head in shame and if 
she had had the good sense to let the matter 
rest there things might have been very different 
with me; or if she had not alluded to it at all 
it would have been infinitely better. But she 
went on lecturing me and finally made the un- 
pardonable blunder of comparing me with my 



ioo The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

older brother, whereupon all my contrition in- 
stantly changed to defiance. She saw the 
change in my attitude without understanding 
its cause and concluded, as she said, that as 
scolding was useless she would see what a 
whipping would do. 

"She was a muscular woman and enjoyed a 
well deserved reputation for her ability to 
wield a black walnut ruler about two feet long, 
an inch and a half wide and a quarter of an 
inch thick. She ordered me to hold out my 
hand and, rising on her tiptoes, she came down 
with all her might. No boy in the school was 
ever known to wait for a second application of 
that ruler, but I sullenly held my hand in the 
same position and looked the defiance that I 
felt. My attitude angered her and she applied 
the ruler the second time with no better effect. 
I believe I would have stood there until she had 
exhausted her strength, but she ordered me to 
leave the room. The blood was just trickling 
through the skin and my hand was swollen for 
some days afterward. 

"After this occurrence I made no further at- 



Into the Depths 101 

tempt to work in school. I was in a state of 
sullen defiance and my old hatred of the school 
had revived with increased force. Some weeks 
later I was taken out of school and put to work 
in the fields. 'And the last state of that man is 
made worse than the first/ 

"While I grew to hate intensely everything 
connected with the school, I never really 
blamed the teacher. I knew that my conduct 
deserved the punishment and I took it as a 
matter of course, but I was thoroughly discour- 
aged, nevertheless, and I was delighted to es- 
cape from the school and its humiliations and 
burdens. 

"As I look back now I realize, of course, that 
the teacher made a mistake. A wise teacher 
will overlook many things and I am convinced, 
after many years of experience with school 
discipline, that most teachers talk too much. 

"My condition from my ninth to my thir- 
teenth year was due, as I have already said, 
to a phase of abnormally rapid physical devel- 
opment, but this had practically come to an 
end at the time of my return to school and if 



102 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

I had been handled properly my mental life 
might have been awakened at that time and I 
might have been given a discipline that would 
have saved me much in the years that were to 
follow. Teachers, however, are not infallible 
and mistakes are likely to occur for which 
they should not be blamed too severely. 

"On my return to work on the farm, the re- 
alization grew upon me that I was not as other 
boys. They had brains and talents which I 
knew I did not possess. I could plow and 
mow and reap and sow, but I could not imagine 
what the world was like to those around me 
who were smart and used to read the papers 
and keep track of the march of events in the 
great outer world. 

"One day, when I was about fourteen years 
old, I was lying on a bench outside the dining 
room window resting after dinner, when my 
father and mother and my uncle, who was vis- 
iting us for the first time within my memory, 
entered the dining room. Without intending 
to eaves-drop I overheard their conversation. 
My uncle was saying, as they came in : Tt's a 



Into the Depths 103 

shame that you don't try to do something for 
poor Ed/ and mother replied : 'We have done 
everything that we could think of but it seems 
hopeless. The teachers sent him home from 
school when he was nine years old; they said 
he could learn nothing but vicious habits from 
the bad boys who attended school. We sent 
him back to school last year and the teacher 
did everything in her power to help him but 
after three months gave it up as useless. If 
we could only teach him reading and writing 
and arithmetic so that he could get along on 
the farm, we would be satisfied.' 

"This was the first intimation I had of the 
reason which led my parents to keep me home 
from school. Although I knew in a general 
way that I had no talents such as other boys 
possessed, nevertheless, my mother's words 
came to me like a sentence of condemnation and 
they crushed me utterly. I slunk away from 
the bench like a wounded animal and hid my- 
self in the corn field. 

"During the two years that followed the 
gloom and despondency that settled over me 



104 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

were deep indeed. I used to look at the work- 
men on the place with a feeling of reverent 
wonder for they had brains and were as other 
people and I could no more imagine what the 
world looked like to their eyes than I can now 
imagine what this world of eager, struggling 
humanity must be like to the angels. 

"I made no attempt to read; I forgot the 
multiplication table; and I do not think I could 
have written my own name when I was sixteen 
years old. I shrunk more than ever from con- 
tact with strangers; I g*rew silent and sullen. 
One word of fault finding was quite sufficient 
to throw me into a rage. My people seemed 
to understand this side of my character and 
avoided everything that would anger me. 

"In spite of my sullenness I was a rather 
pious boy during those years. There was no 
storm severe enough to keep the family home 
from church on Sunday. We all went to Con- 
fession and Communion once a month. No 
matter how tired I might have been I do not 
believe that I ever went to b'ed without saying 
my night prayers and my rosary. God and the 



Into the Depths 105 

Blessed Virgin, my guardian angel and the 
saints were as real to me as the people who sur- 
rounded me. Whenever I particularly wanted 
anything I dropped on my knees behind the 
plow or in the wagon box and asked for it with 
far more confidence of being heard and an- 
swered than I would have had in making any 
request from my earthly parents. 

"Sometimes I used to dream about my fu- 
ture. A religious vocation occasionally teased 
my imagination. Of course I did not dream 
of being a priest, for I knew that a priest had 
to have brains and had to be a very learned 
man and besides, my family had set their hearts 
on my little brother's becoming a priest. He 
was the brightest boy in school and used to 
serve Mass on Sundays and they were all very 
proud of him. 

"I had heard people talk about lay brothers 
whose duty was to work in the fields and to 
take care of the cattle, and I imagined that I 
might become a lay brother. Sometimes I used 
to wonder whether I would be a farmer, but 
I found it impossible to complete the picture, as 



106 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

I could not imagine a farmer without a far- 
mer's wife and I never dared to hope that any 
girl would look with favor upon Studevan's 
omadhaun." 



CHAPTER X 
The Awakening 

"Jerome K. Jerome, in his essay on The 
Motherliness of Man,' said the Doctor, "re- 
marks, 'to talk like an idiot when you are an 
idiot, brings no discomfort; to behave as an 
idiot when you have sense enough to know it, 
is painful/ My mental life had reached its low- 
est ebb in my fourteenth year, and prior to that 
time my condition caused me but little discom- 
fort, probably because I was not possessed of 
enough intelligence to realize my condition. 

"The pain began with my awakening intelli- 
gence in the beginning of my fifteenth year, but 
many long years dragged by their leaden feet 
before I understood that the pain was a har- 
binger of salvation. Those around me had as 
little knowledge of my awakening mental life 
as they had of the pain and humiliation that I 
was suffering. 



io8 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

"My repeated failures at school and the atti- 
tude of those around me produced in me an 
abiding conviction that I did not know any- 
thing and that I never would know anything. 
The struggle between this conviction and my 
growing mental life continued to my twenty- 
first year. 

"I suppose the pathway that leads up out of 
the depths is always painful. I have no inten- 
tion, however, of burdening you with the par- 
ticular trials that fell to my lot during those 
six years. I take it for granted that you are 
chiefly interested in my mental awakening and 
in the causes which produced it. I retain vivid 
memory pictures of the incidents that filled out 
those years, probably because they occurred so 
late in life, and because of the pain which 
many of them involved. 

"The beneficent role of pain in physical life 
has often been pointed out. It keeps the child 
from burning his fingers a second time; it 
drives the animal to seek food to assuage his 
hunger and drink to quench his thirst. Pain 
warns us against danger and compels us to 



The Awakening 109 

seek remedies for many of the ills to which 
flesh is heir. 

"All this is just as true of mental and moral 
life as it is of physical life. It is true in many 
senses that there is no Easter Sunday without 
its Good Friday. 'Unless the grain of wheat 
falling into the ground perish, it remaineth 
alone; but if it perish, it b'ringeth forth much 
fruit.' I do not want to preach a sermon on 
this theme, but it is quite necessary to the sub- 
ject in hand that we have some realization of 
the role which pain and humiliation played in 
the awakening and development of my mental 
life. 

"As I have said, I had reached my present 
height and weight when I was fourteen years 
old. The muscles that were soft in the days of 
their rapid growth soon hardened into strength, 
and in the exercise of this strength I first tasted 
the joy of feeling myself equal, at least in one 
respect, to my fellows. Tom Sawyer touched 
some of the deeper springs of human nature 
when he collected toll from his neighbors for 



no The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

granting them the privilege of whitewashing 
his fence. 

"It was no little thing for me, who felt my- 
self inferior in every other respect to the immi- 
grant laborers on my father's farm, to pass 
from the lighter occupations assigned to the 
boy to the harder work of the man. To com- 
pete successfully in strength and endurance 
with men who had passed the golden line of 
twenty-one, while I was still a boy of fourteen, 
was to gain some little measure of self-respect 
and to lay the foundation of self-reliance. To 
be able to chop as much wood in a day, to hoe 
as many rows of corn, to shock as many acres 
of grain as the best man on the farm, did not 
at the time appear to me as being in any way 
connected with education, but it did give me a 
sense of satisfaction that more than compen- 
sated for the fatigue entailed. And while deep 
discouragement and the sentence of condemna- 
tion pronounced upon my mental powers barred 
every other gateway, my budding conscious life 
found here an avenue of growth. 

"From these rude employments I gradually 



The Awakening in 

progressed to others which called for some lit- 
tle measure of skill, such as plowing a straight 
furrow, building a load of hay, or pitching 
bundles of grain to the top of a high stack. 
There were not wanting occupations which de- 
veloped rapidity of movement, such as husking 
corn or binding on a harvester. And while I 
never learned to be precisely a 'broncho-bus- 
ter/ I delighted in feats of horsemanship in 
which I acquired no mean skill. I also gradu- 
ally learned to use the simpler carpenter tools 
in repairing fences and barns and in building 
outhouses. We repaired our own farm machin- 
ery and I was frequently called upon to assist. 
My eye was trained to reasonable accuracy of 
measurement; I could tell a fourteen or a six- 
teen foot board to within an inch of its length 
without the use of a measure. 

"The constant variety of scene and of occu- 
pation that came with the changing seasons 
provided me with the best possible sensory mo- 
tor training. This training formed the basis 
of all my subsequent mental development. Of 
course I did not realize the value of these things 



1 12 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

to mental life, but as I look b'ack upon them 
now I know that they were my salvation, and 
that had it not been for them I would probably 
never have come up out of the darkness. 

"No equal period in my school life has left 
with me treasures comparable in value to those 
left by those years on the farm while I believed 
myself banished forever from school and books 
and human companionship. Those years left 
with me a sensory-motor training of a high or- 
der, a robust constitution, an enduring love of 
work, self-reliance and a determined will." 

"From the way you tell the story, Doctor," 
said Professor Shannon, "one would be led to 
suppose that you advocate child-labor instead 
of play grounds and the axe and grubhoe as 
substitutes for the gymnasium and the ball 
field." 

"That is always the way with you, Profes- 
sor, you are supposing and seeing theories 
everywhere. My only concern was to give you 
a truthful account of the path my feet took in 
coming up out of the gloom. If you find your 
theories embodied in this, I shall be delighted; 



The Awakening 113 

and if you find embodied here theories that dis- 
please you, that is not my concern at present. 
Later, if opportunity offers, we may discuss 
educational theories in the light of the facts that 
I am narrating. 

"The physical development which I have re- 
ferred to rather than described, was of course 
not directed in accordance with any theory or 
with any deliberate view to education. It was 
the result of work, not of play, but the circum- 
stances surrounding this work happened to be 
of the most favorable kind. This was particu- 
larly true for a boy in my condition. 

"It must be remembered that the work was 
not that of a factory; it kept the boy out-of- 
doors and in close contact with nature, and it 
was not confined to any one occupation. The 
deadening effect of monotony was entirely ab- 
sent; all the senses were appealed to in turn. 
The smell of the fresh up-turned soil, the per- 
fume of the wild rose, and the odor of the new- 
mown hay are still with me, as are the calls of 
the cat-b'ird, the whistle of the bobolink, the 
humming of the bees and the familiar spec- 



1 14 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

tacle of the prairie chicken inviting death by 
shamming a broken wing in order to divert 
attention and avert danger from her young. 

"With these sights and sounds of nature are 
inseparably entwined in the tangled skein of 
memory the outward signs of a human activity 
that blended with nature's processes. I can still 
feel on my feet the soft, wet moss of the 
meadow bottoms, and see the rhythm of the 
twenty mowers, and hear the swish of the 
scythes through the soft grass, and the music 
of the whetstones on the steel blades. 

"The constant change of work that charac- 
terized the farm labor of those days must not 
be put on a level with the unchanging monot- 
ony that characterizes the occupation of a fac- 
tory hand. Another great advantage attaches 
to the sort of training that we received on the 
farm; the work is not done for the sake of 
the training ; there is no make-believe about it ; 
it is animated by an earnest purpose; some- 
thing real is being done every hour. 

"The absence of this motive is one of the 
chief drawbacks to all artificial systems of 



The Awakening 115 

training*. Exercise that is taken merely for the 
sake of the training is as incapable of produc- 
ing the highest physical development as is 
speaking merely for practice incapable of pro- 
ducing the highest type of eloquence, or as is 
writing for the sake of illustrating principles 
of rhetoric incapable of producing a vigorous 
style. It is true that for young children the 
play instinct supplies for this earnest motive, 
but there is nothing that develops character and 
self-reliance in youth so surely as real occupa- 
tions and real responsibilities. 

"I would not have any one suppose how- 
ever, that I advocate subjecting other children 
to such experiences as those I passed through 
at that time. I am merely trying to trace the 
educative value of the experiences as they oc- 
curred in my own case, which, as every one 
will recognize, is far from being typical. Nor 
do I take it for granted that the experiences 
through which I passed were, in all respects, 
the best for my own development. Had I been 
under the direction of some one who under- 
stood my case, many things might have been 



1 1 6 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

accomplished for me, and many mistakes, from 
the evil effects of which I still suffer, might 
have been avoided.' , 

"It is easy to recognize the value of the 
physical training that you received on the 
farm," said Miss Ruth, "and I am beginning 
to understand where you get your power of 
work ; but granting all that you claim for your 
sense development and for your motor train- 
ing, I still fail to understand how these things 
could have led you back to school. The very 
joy of work in the open fields, and the flowers 
and the songs of birds would all seem to ren- 
der the hated school still more hateful." 

"That is all quite true," replied the Doctor, 
"and such was doubtless the first effect of these 
things ; but I did not return to school for some 
years and there were several intermediate 
phases of development which I have not yet 
touched upon. If you will bear with me a 
while I shall try to clear up the difficulty. 

"The abnormally rapid physical growth that 
preceded my fourteenth year was followed, as 
I have already pointed out, by a period of 



The Awakening 117 

sensory-motor development in which there 
was no thought of books or of formal studies. 
In the beginning of this stage there were only 
faint glimmerings of intelligence, but as time 
went on these grew into a distinct phase of in- 
tellectual development. Of course there were 
no sharp lines of demarcation between these 
several phases ; they overlapped and shaded off 
into each other by imperceptible degrees. The 
transition from one of these phases to an- 
other will perhaps be most readily understood 
by following the development along certain 
definite lines." 



CHAPTER XI 

Development of the Number Concept 

"I shall begin with the development of the 
number concept. At fourteen I had forgotten 
the multiplication table, but I could count; and 
while I would have been sadly puzzled if asked 
to add six and nine, I could have found the 
result by counting on my fingers. I was not 
in the habit of using a pencil or a pen, so 
I did not realize my limitations in any very 
painful way. 

"We used to raise several thousand bushels 
of grain on our farm. When I was a boy of 
nine or ten, it was my task to 'hold sacks'; 
that is, I held the bag while my father emptied 
into it three half-bushels of grain. Each time 
the measure was emptied, I lifted the bag so as 
to pack down the grain; in this way I learned 
through the sense of sight and through the 
muscle sense the size and weight of a half 
bushel, a bushel, and a bushel and a half of 



Development of the Number Concept 119 

grain. This experience was repeated over and 
over again thousands of times each year. I was 
also in the habit of counting the sacks as we 
stood them up against each other, until I be- 
came able to recognize with a fair degree of 
accuracy when there were in the pile twenty 
sacks, the number that made a load. 

"When I was fifteen years old I was one of 
the strongest men about the place, and I was 
accordingly assigned the task of hauling in the 
grain. I used to lift the bags containing a 
bushel and a half each into the wagon-box, and 
when I arrived at the granary I lifted them to 
my shoulder, and running up a ladder some ten 
or twelve feet high, emptied them into a bin. 

"In the winter season, when we marketed 
the grain, it was my task to tie the sacks, each 
of which contained something over two bush- 
els, and to pile ten of these sacks on the scales 
and weigh them. I knew the weights and could 
call out the totals for ten sacks, which usually 
ran between twelve and thirteen hundred 
pounds. My brother entered these weights in 
his book, and I have a distinct remembrance of 



120 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

the reverence with which I regarded his ability 
to discover from these weights the number of 
bushels and the number of pounds in each 
'batch/ I used to long for the ability to work 
out this problem, but as I had forgotten my 
multiplication table and had forgotten how to 
do a sum in long division, it baffled me for a 
long time. 

"Finally, I took to counting up the weight on 
my fingers. I knew that sixty pounds consti- 
tuted one bushel of wheat and then as I count- 
ed on my fingers seventy, eighty, ninety, one 
hundred, one hundred and ten, one hundred and 
twenty, I found the weight of two bushels, and 
thus I kept on counting until I finally reached 
the weights which my scales recorded. Each 
bushel that I added in imagination was a real 
bushel, known to me through thousands of in- 
dividual muscular efforts, and each two bush- 
els formed a new unit which had just as vivid 
an abiding place in my sensile memory. But 
my answers, for all that, were always wrong. 
I went back over the process and counted up 
again and again, hundreds of times, and still 



Development of the Number Concept 121 

I was always wrong. Twelve hundred pounds 
would spell out twenty bushels, and twelve 
hundred and sixty pounds would as invariably 
divide itself up into twenty-one bushels, but 
my brother always found a different answer. 

"It never occurred to me to ask any one for 
an explanation, and prob'ably if I had asked I 
would have been put off with a smile; for I 
verily believe that any of the men around the 
place would have been heartily ashamed of him- 
self had he been caught in the act of trying to 
explain a sum in arithmetic to the omadhaun. 
So the problem continued to baffle me for more 
than a year until I overheard my brother do- 
ing the sum out loud one day, and thus dis- 
covered that he subtracted ten pounds for sack 
weight. This was my first discovery in Pure 
Science, and the joy that it brought me was 
in no way diminished by my failure to recog- 
nize that it was the beginning of an intellectual 
development that would one day lift me into 
companionship with the learned. 

"In the years that followed I tied and 
weighed a great many thousand bushels of 



122 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard! 

wheat, but never, I think, without mentally cal- 
culating the bushels and pounds, and the proc- 
ess was always the same, although I soon 
learned to dispense with the use of my fingers 
in counting and dealt wholly with sense im- 
ages; but they were the sense images of real 
bushels of wheat and not of the artificial sym- 
bols on which children's minds are sometimes 
fed. 



CHAPTER XII 
The Development of Spatial Relationship 

"The sense imagery that formed the basis 
of number in my mind was derived chiefly 
through the muscle sense. While the sense of 
touch and the sense of sight each contributed 
to the mental images of the various measures 
of wheat, there can be no question that the 
chief content of these images resulted from the 
constant repetition of muscular exertions. It 
is, perhaps, worth while to emphasize this fact. 
It is in harmony with some recent theories of 
mental development, and it is in entire accord 
with much of the work that is being done at 
present for the reclamation of the dullard. It 
is hardly necessary to add that while this was 
the foundation of the number concept in my 
mental development, it was not the only series 
of experiences that contributed to the growth 
and development of this side of my mind. 

"During the summers between my tenth and 



124 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

fourteenth years I helped to build several miles 
of board fence around our farm to replace the 
original rail fences that were falling into de- 
cay. In this way I learned to use the square 
and the hand-saw, and I made the close ac- 
quaintance of boards six inches wide and four- 
teen or sixteen feet long. The posts were not 
always placed accurately and so we were at 
times obliged to select boards that were either 
a little longer or a little shorter than the stand- 
ard lengths. My eye was thus gradually 
trained to judge with considerable accuracy 
small variations in the lengths of the boards. 
During these years I was also frequently de- 
tailed to help the carpenters with the rougher 
work in building barns and out-houses, an oc- 
cupation that taught me the use of the simpler 
carpenter tools and familiarized me with vari- 
ous lengths and dimensions. 

"When I was about fifteen years old we 
hauled two or three car-loads of lumber from 
a siding a few miles from the farm to build a 
barn. I drove one of the teams and helped to 
load and unload the lumber. One day we load- 



Development of Spatial Relationship 125 

ed some green sills onto my wagon. Before 
the load had attained its usual size my brother 
remarked that I had eight hundred feet on, 
which, owing to the bad condition of the 
roads, he said, was quite enough for my team. 
I knew that the load was heavy enough for 
my team, but his remark that there were eight 
hundred feet of lumber on my wagon puzzled 
me sadly. 

"At this time I could measure off a foot with 
my eye with great accuracy, and I had just as 
accurate an idea of what constituted a square 
foot, but, in my mind, neither of these things 
had anything to do with solids. I had fre- 
quently marked off a corn field into square 
yards and counted up the yards. I had often 
counted up the square feet of floor space in a 
bin or stall. But the cubic foot was my unit 
of measure for all solids. I was familiar with 
this cube in putting up ice and in measuring 
cord wood. I had no suspicion that the volume 
of a foot of lumber differed in any way from 
that of a foot of cord wood. I had hauled many 
a cord of wood and I knew its dimensions, eight 



126 The Making and the Unmaking of a Duilard 

feet long, four feet wide, and four feet high, 
and I had frequently counted up the one hun- 
dred and twenty-eight feet which it contained. 
But this load of lumber, which to my eye did 
not seem much more than half as large as a 
cord of wood, contained, according to my broth- 
er's statement, eight hundred feet. 

"I gave expression to my surprise, but my 
brother only repeated that there were eight 
hundred and sixty-four feet on the load. I puz- 
zled over this all the way home. While I rest- 
ed my team at the foot of a long hill, I went 
over the load carefully. It was one foot deep, 
three feet wide, and twenty-four feet long. I 
could not multiply these dimensions, of course, 
but I could measure off the blocks with my 
eye and count them up. As I went back over 
the load from side to side, marking off the 
square feet with my finger, I found that I had 
only seventy-two feet instead of the eight hun- 
dred and sixty-four feet of which my brother 
spoke. 

"It was a clear case of conflict between evi- 
dence and authority, and, as usual, authority 



Development of Spatial Relationship 127 

had the best of it. My brother was to me an 
oracle on all matters, and I knew that he must 
"be right whatever came of the evidence of my 
senses. But the problem stuck in my mind and 
teased me and I could not get rid of it. That 
evening at supper I mentioned the matter again 
to my brother. I told him that I had meas- 
ured that load of lumber and that there were 
only seventy-two feet in it instead of eight 
hundred and sixty-four. He smiled his usual 
pitying smile that I remember so well. He 
doubtless considered my remark another proof 
of my hopeless idiocy. 

"The matter did not rest here, however. I 
had very few things to think about in those 
days and that puzzle kept rattling about in my 
mind, teasing me. Every time I handled lum- 
ber I counted up the feet, and when I could get 
any one to measure the lumber for me and tell 
me how many feet there really were, I was 
confronted with the same old baffling contra- 
diction. They all confirmed my brother's state- 
ment and contradicted the tangible evidence of 
my senses. 



128 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

"It never once occurred to me to question 
the accuracy of my idea of what constituted a 
foot of lumber, and those around me either 
failed to understand the nature of my difficulty 
or simply brushed it aside as one more of the 
omadhaun's vagaries, which it would have been 
worse than folly to seek to understand." 

"Pardon me for interrupting you, Doctor," 
said Miss Russell, "but isn't that the reason why 
so many people are unable to help the children ? 
The same words mean different things to the 
teacher and to the pupil, and they are constant- 
ly misunderstanding each other." 

"Yes, that is precisely it, Miss Russell, and if 
the truth were known, many a dullard was 
made in this way. But at present the tendency 
is decidedly in the right direction. The teach- 
er usually recognizes the folly of attempting to 
explain anything to a child until she herself 
has first learned to see it through his eyes. If 
she can comprehend his difficulty, it is an easy 
matter to remove it. 

"But to return to my story, I have often said 
that I had no teacher to help me up out of the 



Development of Spatial Relationship 129 

darkness. This statement needs some modifi- 
cation. I had two brothers, Joe, ten years 
older than myself, and Bernard twelve, each 
of whom, without intending it, perhaps, per- 
formed for me some of the functions of a 
teacher. It would be difficult to find two men 
who, in their mental life, offered a more com- 
plete contrast to each other. 

%t Joe was a calm, decisive, impertubable man ; 
he was an omniverous reader; he was boss on 
the farm at the time of which I speak, and his 
orders were final and his decisions irrevoca- 
ble. Joe dealt only in conclusions ; his proc- 
esses of reasoning and his data were all re- 
served for his own exclusive use. 

"Bernard, on the contrary, was a mechanical 
genius, and while he had a fair education and 
was fond of reading, his mental life was built 
up largely of his own experiences. He was 
never content with assertions; he had to see 
things. If you differed from him, he proced- 
ed at once to find out the reasons for the dif- 
ference. With him there were twenty correct 
ways of doing everything, instead of one, and 



130 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

it was only a question of choosing which of 
the twenty ways was the best. 

"I need not add that the brother that I have 
referred to in both the wheat and the lumber 
incidents was Joe. Bernard was married at 
the time and lived on a farm of his own ad- 
joining ours, and while we frequently worked 
together, I was in much less direct and frequent 
contact with him than I was with Joe. 

"One day about a year after the incident of 
the load of lumber to which I have just re- 
ferred I was helping Bernard put a roof on 
a barn. We ran short of sheeting lumber, and 
as Joe was just leaving for town, Bernard called 
down to him to bring home two hundred feet 
of it. I had noticed the shortage and had 
counted up the amount of lumber that would 
be needed, so I protested that seventeen feet, 
not two hundred, was all that would be re- 
quired. 

"Bernard asked me how I made that out. 
The unfinished strip of roof was seventeen feet 
long and twelve feet wide, so the problem was 
quite easy. I called Bernard's attention to the 



Development of Spatial Relationship 131 

fact that seventeen boards one foot wide and 
twelve feet long, each of which contained, ac- 
cording to my count, but one foot of lumber, 
would just finish the roof. Bernard asked me 
what I meant by saying that there was only 
one foot of lumber in each of the boards, and 
when I explained the matter to him, he said that 
I was thinking of a cubic foot and that a foot 
of lumber was only one inch deep. At last I 
had the solution of my problem. 

"From this time forward the foot wide 
board became my standard of measurement. In 
imagination I saw it cut up into as many actual 
feet of lumber as the board contained. Fenc- 
ing lumber presented no difficulty. These boards 
were all six inches wide, and by placing two 
of them side by side they were readily convert- 
ed into boards a foot wide. 

"The two by six dimension lumber was 
scarcely more difficult than the fencing lumber. 
I imagined each of these timbers split into two 
fence boards, and these placed side by side 
formed a one foot board. The six by six's were 
all first converted into two by six's. I spent 



132 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

some weeks, while plowing or working in the 
fields, calculating the amount of lumber in ev- 
ery fence about the farm. But when I attempt- 
ed to count up the amount of lumber in a barn, 
I soon struck a snag. In the barn there were 
numbers of two by four studding and two by 
four rafters and two by eight joists, and, at 
times, eight by eight sills. I could do nothing 
with any of these dimensions. 

"I split the two by four's in imagination as 
I had the two by six's, but the two four-inch 
strips placed side by side measured only eight 
inches. They were too wide to be dealt with as 
fence boards and too narrow to be classed with 
the one foot boards. I split two of these scant- 
lings in imagination and placed the four strips 
side by side ; but they measured sixteen inches, 
and so the difficulty remained, and for a time 
it seemed hopeless. 

"Had I actually split the scantlings instead 
of doing so in imagination only, I would prob- 
ably have discovered that three of the four inch 
strips would make a board a foot wide. But 
as the case stood, it was some months before I 



Development of Spatial Relationship 133 

realized that by splitting three of the two by- 
four's and placing the six resulting strips side 
by side, I could convert them into two one foot 
boards. 

"After this, all difficulty in calculating the 
quantity of lumber rapidly disappeared. The 
four by four's, the two by eight's, and the 
eight by eight's were readily resolved into foot 
boards in the same manner as the two by four's. 
The ten inch wide material still presented some 
difficulty, but I soon hit upon the device of 
ripping off two inches of these timbers and put- 
ting the pieces together so as to make four 
inch or eight inch stuff. Sometimes I cut a 
two inch strip, in imagination, off a two by 
eight and added it to a two by four, thus con- 
verting the two pieces into two two by six's. 
Sometimes I converted in the same way three 
two by eight's into four two by six's. 

"At that time I did not know the meaning 
of angle or triangle; I think I had not even 
heard the word geometry, and, as I have said 
before, I did not know the multiplication table. 
It would probably have been necessary for me 



134 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

to resort to counting in order to add such large 
numbers as seven and nine; but I was solving 
many practical problems in plane and solid 
geometry, nevertheless, and the fever of in- 
vestigation had taken a deep hold of me. 

"The areas of irregular corners were yet to 
be calculated, and I resorted to various devices 
to reduce these corners to some regular shape 
that I could deal with. The sheeting of the 
gable ends of buildings compelled me to deal 
with triangles, although I am not aware that 
I used the term. I soon learned that in fitting* 
a piece of board into the angle of the gable, 
there were two triangular pieces cut off which, 
if put together on their square edges, would 
just cover the same space. 

"From this I soon learned that if I calculated 
every board on one gable as having the same 
length as the longest board, there would be 
enough lumber to cover two gables. Years af- 
terward I learned that the scientific way of stat- 
ing this simple truth is : the area of a triangle 
is equal to one half of the base into the altitude. 
Again, we usually nailed the jack-rafters to the 



Development of Spatial Relationship 135 

middle of the rafters, and they were always lev- 
el. Of course, I afterward learned that the 
right way to state this is : a line dividing two 
sides of a triangle proportionally is parallel 
to the base." 

"So you were really trained in the Speer 
method," said Miss Ruth. 

"Yes, in a measure, I was, although the 
Speer block method was not developed until 
many years after the time of which I speak, 
and I had no more thought of educating myself 
by all this day-dreaming, as it seemed to me, 
than those around me had that I was being edu- 
cated. My mind was simply growing and hun- 
gry. Having been thoroughly discouraged in 
every other direction, it grew along these lines, 
and rejoiced in its activity without even sus- 
pecting that it was growing. 

"There are some obvious resemblances be- 
tween the haphazard training that I received 
and the systematic training that children now 
receive in those schools that use the Speer 
blocks ; but there are also many important points 
of difference to be noted. The work with the 



136 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

blocks is systematic and the child gains as much, 
in some ways at least, in a month as I gained 
in years. 

"But, on the other hand, every little bit of 
truth that the growing mind discovers for itself 
has more real value than many times the quan- 
tity if fed to it. There is a development of 
self-reliance and originality in discovery that 
is seldom attained in systematic instruction. 
Then, too, I made my own blocks and was com- 
pelled at a very early date to use imaginary 
ones. 

"These memory pictures played a much 
larger role in my case than they do in the sys- 
tematic training that is usually given in the 
schools where the children deal with actual 
blocks of all sizes and shapes. This fact is 
probably responsible for the power of con- 
structive imagination which I formerly regard- 
ed as one of my best natural gifts, but which I 
have since come to believe was largely, if not 
wholly, due to the training of which I have 
just been speaking. I shall have occasion to 
return to this theme bye and bye ; but there are 



Development of Spatial Relationship 137 

a few other lines of development that belong to 
this period which I think it better to consider 
first" 



CHAPTER XIII 
Contact With Nature 

"A third line of development, closely related 
in many ways to the two that I have just out- 
lined, but much more complex in character, 
finally brought me up out of the gloom and 
made me realize that at least in some things re- 
quiring brains I could succeed as well as others. 

"At present, the Minnesota River meanders 
between narrow banks in a marshy bottom for 
some twenty miles before it is joined by the 
Mississippi. It's low banks are covered with 
fine old lindens and stately elms interspersed 
with occasional clusters of cottonwood and 
willow. The wild grape grows here in great 
profusion. Here and there it strangles a young 
sapling and converts it into a trellis. The 
more ambitious vines reach up and festoon the 
lofty arches formed by the branches of the 
linden and the elm. The wild plum, the su- 
mac, and the hazel bush form a thickly tangled 



Contact with Nature 139 

mass wherever the tall trees permit sufficient 
light to enter. 

"In past ages, here flowed a majestic river 
more than four miles wide, which, in the 
course of time, cut its way through some forty 
feet of limestone and more than one hundred 
feet of underlying soft white sandstone. The 
Mississippi emptied into the Minnesota at the 
head of this broad valley until a terminal mo- 
raine formed by the ancient glacier diverted its 
course into a new bed and caused it to plunge 
over a high precipice at the present point of 
junction. After this, the current of the Min- 
nesota became very slow, and the accumulat- 
ing sediment gradually confined the channel 
to its present course, leaving the remainder of 
the original river bottom covered by a shallow 
lake. 

"As time went on, water lilies, bullrushes, 
wild rice, and weeds of various kinds choked 
up the greater part of the lake. Each year 
the melting snows and the spring rains caused 
the river to overflow its banks and to spread a 
layer of mud over the whole extent of the 



140 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

ancient river bottom, which, with the decaying 
vegetation, formed successive layers of peat. 

"This peat marsh is at present covered with 
moss and with luxuriant growths of blue-joint, 
red-top, vetch, and various wild grasses. In- 
numerable springs of clear, cold water bubble 
tip through the peat from the underlying sand- 
stone and wend their way to the open lake in 
little streams that gurgle and murmur between 
over-hanging mossy banks, sometimes linger- 
ing in the open sunshine, where they are filled 
with watercress, and again tumbling over some 
slight obstruction in mimic waterfalls, or hid- 
ing for a time beneath the peat. The tiger- 
lily, the iris, and the wild morning glory are 
everywhere in evidence. 

"Each year, with the spring floods, multi- 
tudes of fish, coming up the river to cast their 
spawn, pass into the lake, where they are left 
imprisoned by the rapidly subsiding waters. In 
the tall reeds that still fringe the lake the sum- 
mer breezes have rocked the nests of innumer- 
able generations of red-winged blackbirds. 
Here, too, is the home of the meadow-lark, 



Contact with Nature 141 

the snipe, and the crane, of the wild duck and 
the loon. This meadow is the paradise of 
1 snails and frogs. Here the bumble bee finds 
* immunity from the depredations of the field- 
mouse and may lay up his secure store of 
honey in each high tuft of moss. Here is the 
breeding place of the mosquito and the feed- 
ing ground of the dragon fly. 

"Here in this world of beauty and of teem- 
ing life, the Julys of all my boyhood summers 
were spent in working with the haying crew. 
Here I gradually grew into a knowledge of 
many of nature's processes and into sympathy 
with many of her moods. With no teacher 
but nature herself, I was made a daily witness 
of the many-sided struggle for existence going 
on about me, and the germ of many a natural 
truth, destined to grow and bear fruit in after 
years, found lodgment in my mind. Mean- 
while, my mental life was being lifted into a 
new phase of development through the expen- 
diture of my muscular energy. 

"These meadow bottoms are too soft to per- 
mit of the use of horses or of machinery. All 



142 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

the hay is cut with scythes and gathered up into 
cocks with pitchforks. Forty or fifty of these 
cocks are then carried on poles and built into 
a stack, in which the hay remains until the 
frosts of winter make it possible for the teams 
to approach.' ' 



CHAPTER XIV 
Germinal Truths 

"A large part of mechanics naturally grows 
out of a knowledge of the lever. And, during 
the haying season each year, the constant use 
of the hay-pole and pitchfork gave me a thor- 
ough knowledge of the lever." 

"I hope you won't think me stupid," said 
Miss Russell, "but I don't see how you learned 
mechanics through the use of a pitchfork. I 
have no talent for physics and I had the hard- 
est time to get a pass-mark in the subject when 
I was going through the high sc^Jol; but if 
physics can be learned by the use <5f such sim- 
ple instruments as a pitchfork and a hay-pole, 
there may still be some hope for me. Won't 
you please explain how you did it ?" 

"I shall be delighted to do so, Miss Russell; 
however, I must first protest that you do your- 
self great injustice when you say you have no 
talent for physics. From what I saw of your 



144 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

work in the Lee School the other day, I am 
convinced that there is no subject in the curri- 
culum for which you have not splendid talent. 
No, I am not complimenting, I mean just what 
I say. The teacher, in my opinion, is always 
to blame for the want of these special talents 
in the pupil, of which we so often hear. 

"When we begin to teach mechanics with 
deductions from abstract principles, we are 
simply reversing the natural order of the 
mind's growth. We should be quite correct 
were we to define a machine as a transformer 
of energy, and we might enter into an elabor- 
ate explanation of the meaning of such terms 
as energy and transformation. When we had 
finish ^ nils who had listened to us 

might ti^xi they understood what a ma- 

chine was, but their knowledge would be sterile. 

"From Aristotle's day down to modern times 
philosophers have busied themselves with elab- 
orating theories concerning the nature of mat- 
ter, and they doubtless believed themselves ta 
be possessed of much profound knowledge of 
the subject; but, however correct their theories 



Germinal Truths 145 

may have been, it is well for us to remember 
that such theories have never yet led to prac- 
tical results. Modern sciences and modern in- 
ventions have all grown out of actual contact 
with nature and not out of the speculations of 
philosophers. 

"This, however, does not justify the abuse 
of the inductive method which is so frequently 
to be found in our modern schools. When our 
enthusiasm for the inductive method leads 
us to overwhelm our pupils with a multi- 
tude of details before they have obtained 
a general view of the subject, the usual result 
is an uncoordinated mass of facts, from which 
the pupils are unable to extract the great fun- 
damental truths; and withpr ^these truths 
there can be little real pre j,iess toward the 
mastery of any science. 

"Were we to take our pupils into a supply 
store and show them an endless variety of 
valves, wheels, and levers, they would be little 
better off, as far as a knowledge of mechanics 
is concerned, than if their minds had been fed 
on definitions and formulae. They would be 



146 The Making and the Unmaking of a Duilard 

just as bewildered in the one case as in the 
other, when brought face to face with a set of 
complex machines in actual operation. 

"To obtain satisfactory results in the teach- 
ing of any subject we should begin with ger- 
minal truths which contain the whole body of 
knowledge in somewhat the same manner as 
seeds contain fully developed plants.' ' 

"Pardon me, Doctor," said the Judge, "I am 
afraid I do not quite follow you. Did I not 
understand you to say a while ago that when 
we begin to teach mechanics by putting before 
the pupils a set of deductions from abstract 
principles, we are reversing the natural order 
of the mind's growth? And now you tell us 
that to obtain satisfactory results in the teach- 
ing of any subject we should begin with ger- 
minal truths which contain the whole body of 
knowledge in somewhat the same manner as 
that in which seeds contain fully developed 
plants. Is not this tantamount to saying that 
to obtain satisfactory results we must reverse 
the natural order of the mind's growth? Let 
me state my objection in form as we used to 



Germinal Truths 147 

do in the good old days when we were study- 
ing philosophy under Father Gherardo. 

"To begin the teaching of any subject with 
abstract principles is to reverse the order of 
the mind's growth. But germinal truths, which 
contain the whole body of knowledge after the 
manner in which seeds contain fully developed 
plants, are abstract principles. Therefore, to 
begin the teaching of any subject with ger- 
minal truths is to reverse the natural order 
of the mind's growth, quod absurdum est. 

"Or it may seem preferable to state my ob- 
jection in positive form, thus : To obtain sat- 
isfactory results in the teaching of any subject 
we should begin with germinal truths which 
contain the whole body of knowledge to be 
imparted after the manner in which seeds con- 
tain fully developed plants. But such germinal 
truths are abstract principles. Therefore, to 
obtain satisfactory results in the teaching of 
any subject we should begin with abstract prin- 
ciples." 

"A hit ! a palpable hit !" cried the Professor. 

"I am afraid," said the Doctor, "that I shall 



148 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

have to polish up my armor before entering the 
lists against so redoubtable a champion. But 
if the Judge will consent I think it will not be 
difficult for us to settle our contention at the 
bar of modern pedagogy. 

"In this objection it is taken for granted 
that a germinal truth is the same thing as an 
abstract principle, whereas I, whether justified 
or not, have used the terms to designate things 
that are separated by polar distances. An ab- 
stract principle presupposes a fully developed 
knowledge of the concrete from which it is an 
abstraction. 

"The Greek philosopher, looking back upon 
a rich mental possession, abstracted the central 
thought. It is the terminal stage of a long 
series of mental processes, whereas a germinal 
truth is the initial stage and it leads gradually 
to the full development of the concrete. The 
germinal truth is in a sense rudimentary while 
the abstract principle is vestigial. They re- 
semble each other from the standpoint of quan- 
tity; they are both diminutive; they both con- 



Germinal Truths 149 

tain the central thought and they are both 
equally sparing of details. 

"The point of departure in our Lord's teach- 
ing is always a germinal truth; whereas the 
Greek philosopher usually set out from an ab- 
stract principle. The Greek talked to the high- 
ly developed intellect. Christ spoke to little 
children as well as to philosophers. And He 
warned His followers that if they would un- 
derstand His teaching, they must empty their 
minds of human traditions and of preconceived 
ideas and become as little children. 'Unless 
you become as one of these, you cannot enter 
the kingdom of heaven.' " 



CHAPTER XV 

The Germinal Concept in Mechanics 

"To begin the teaching of mechanics with 
the definition of a machine as a transformer of 
energy is a very different thing from beginning 
the study of the same subject in its concrete, 
germinal form, the lever. Young children, in 
playing with a see-saw, come to understand 
the meaning of the lever of equal and of un- 
equal arms long before their minds are suffi- 
ciently developed to grasp the meaning of ab- 
stract definitions and mathematical formulae. 
They understand that a downward pressure on 
one arm of the lever is changed into an up- 
ward pressure on the other arm, and it does 
not take them long to discover that a child 
sitting out on one end of the see-saw will bal- 
ance two or more children seated near the 
fulcrum on the other end. They understand, 
too, that the longer the arm, the larger the 
movement. 



The Germinal Concept in Mechanics 151 

"In this way there is laid up in the minds of 
the children a secure foundation for the future 
study of the science of physics, since mechan- 
ics is the key to physics and a large part of 
mechanics is contained in the lever in some- 
what the same manner as a fully developed 
plant is contained in a seed. 

"It was not, however, from the see-saw that 
I learned mechanics. The hay-pole and the 
pitchfork are excellent means of developing in 
a boy's mind a clear knowledge of the lever 
and its functions. One hour in a hayfield would 
demonstrate this to your entire satisfaction, 
and if you will come with me in imagination 
to those Minnesota bottoms where I spent my 
boyhood, I think I shall be able to prove my 
point. 

"The cocks of hay that we used to make 
weighed about one hundred pounds each. The 
meadow bottoms were soft and full of holes. 
The hay-poles were of light, well-seasoned pop- 
lar, about ten feet long. A pair of these poles 
was pushed under a cock of hay and the leader 
kept his back as close to the cock as possible 



152 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

so as to give the man who followed some 
chance to pick his steps. 

"In this arrangement the leader carried the 
heavier load. The men frequently changed 
places so as to even up the score. The pair 
of hay-poles thus constituted a simple, primi- 
tive pair of levers. They are the same in prin- 
ciple as the stretcher and the sedan chair, and 
were known to man before the dawn of his- 
tory. They teach their lesson chiefly through 
the muscle sense, and from their earliest use 
man must have recognized the relationship ex- 
isting between the relative lengths of the two 
arms of the lever and the relative distribution 
of the weight which the two men carried. 

"The concept of the lever is developed much 
more fully by the use of the pitchfork. In the 
hay-pole the horizontal position is practically 
maintained, whereas in the pitchfork, the lever 
rotates through half a circle. Again, in the 
hay-pole the weight is always in the middle of 
the lever, whereas in the pitchfork, it is at one 
end and the power and fulcrum are one in 
each hand of the haymaker. 



The Germinal Concept in Mechanics 153 

"If the right hand be held in the middle of 
the fork handle and the left hand at the ex- 
treme end, twice the weight of the hay is sus- 
tained by the right hand while a downward 
pressure equal to the weight of the hay is exert- 
ed by the left hand. Now, the relative posi- 
tions of the hands on the fork handle are con- 
stantly shifting, and so the haymaker learns 
through his muscle sense the meaning of the 
varying lengths of the lever arms and the 
meaning of the relative positions of the lever 
as it moves round the axis of rotation. 

"In the hay-pole, each hand is both power 
and fulcrum and the cock of hay is not quite 
clearly differentiated weight, since, in a sense, 
it is the axis of rotation and in so far it might 
be regarded as a fulcrum. 

"Again, the position of the weight on the 
poles is not sharply denned. In the fork, on 
the contrary, the weight is always at one end 
and it is sharply differentiated from both power 
and fulcrum. Power and fulcrum, however, 
are not clearly differentiated, since either po- 
sition may be made the center of rotation, and, 



154 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

as a matter of fact, both positions are partially 
centers of rotation. 

"It may thus be seen that there is a distinct 
development in the lever as we pass from the 
hay-pole to the pitchfork. The transition from 
the pitchfork to the pulley and to the wheel 
and axle is the next important phase in the 
development of the lever, but we shall have to 
defer its consideration until we meet again 
after the summer vacation." 



CHAPTER XVI 

The Development of the Lever 

"Dr. Studevan," said Mr. O'Brien, "we have 
deferred the reassembling of our little circle 
until you could be with us, as we wished to 
hear the completion of your story before tak- 
ing up the discussion of any other subject. 
We left the boy in the meadows, you remem- 
ber, acquiring a mastery of mechanics through 
exercise with hay-pole and pitchfork. We are 
anxious to learn of the circumstances which 
brought about his return to school." 

"I'm sorry that my absence from the city 
has caused you to miss any of these delightful 
evenings. I was beginning to fear that on my 
return to Dunb'arton Hall I should find you so 
immersed in other subjects that I wouldn't 
have an opportunity to tell you any of the 
creditable things about Studevan's omadhaun." 

"Doctor, I've been puzzling my brain all 



156 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

summer over a statement you made at our 
last meeting about generating a wheel from a 
lever," said Miss Russell. "Won't you please 
help me out of my difficulty before proceeding 
with your story?" 

"I shall be very glad to do so, Miss Russell, 
particularly, as that bears on the next phase of 
mental development that I shall have to de- 
scribe. But I regret that so long a time has 
intervened since our last discussion of the sim- 
ple forms of the lever. A few words then 
would have sufficed to remove your difficulty. 
Let me refresh your memory by restating, in 
as few words as possible, what I said on that 
occasion about the lever and its functions. . 

"The lever is the simplest of machines. It 
may affect energy in any one of four ways: 
it may shift the point of application; it may 
reverse the direction; it may increase the in- 
tensity, acting through a diminished distance; 
it may diminish the intensity, acting through 
an increased distance. 

"Now, let us apply this to the problem of 
generating a wheel from a lever. Here is a 



The Development of the Lever 157 

wheel from a toy wagon from which I shall 
remove the rim, leaving the four spokes in 
position. These four spokes constitute two 
levers having a common fulcrum in my pencil, 
which I shall use as an axle. Let us consider 
first this pair of spokes that are now in a hori- 
zontal position. They constitute a lever of 
equal arms, having a fulcrum at the center. 
An ounce weight at one end of this lever will 
balance an equal weight at the other end, and 
the wheel will consequently remain at rest. 

"Were we now to increase one of these 
weights, the wheel would rotate until the 
heavier weight assumed a position at the bot- 
tom where it would come to rest, with the 
lever in a vertical position. The other lever is 
now in a horizontal position, and if the weights 
were to be shifted to the ends of this lever, the 
motion would be repeated. In practice, this 
would prove inconvenient, and, moreover, the 
lever does perfect work only while it remains 
in a horizontal position. As it departs from 
the horizontal position, its functions, when 
acting against gravity, gradually diminish un- 



158 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

til they finally reach zero when the lever at- 
tains a vertical position. 

"These two defects of our present apparatus 
may be remedied by replacing the rim on the 
wheel, or by choosing a solid wheel instead. A 
horizontal section through this wheel may still 
be considered a lever of equal arms with its 
fulcrum at the center. If instead of fastening 
our weights to the wheel at the points cor- 
responding to the ends of this lever, we fas- 
ten them to the ends of a long cord and pass 
the cord over the wheel, we shall have a pulley. 

"If the weights on the ends of the cord be 
equal, the pulley will remain at rest. If one 
weight be heavier than the other, it will de- 
scend, causing the wheel to rotate, until it 
reaches some support or until the other weight 
reaches the wheel. All the while these two 
weights continue to act on a horizontal lever, 
consisting of a section of the wheel passing 
through the fulcrum and the points where the 
cord leaves the wheel. 

"While we are dealing with this matter it 
may be as well to mention one or two other 



The Development of the Lever 159 

points about machines that will serve to throw 
light upon the phase of mental development 
which I shall presently try to explain. The 
functions of the lever which we have just con- 
sidered are the shifting of the point of appli- 
cation of the energy and the reversing of its 
direction. 

"The intensifying of the energy or the in- 
creasing of the distance through which it acts, 
is secured by the use of the lever of unequal 
arms, or by the form of lever that has its ful- 
crum at one end. 

"If we support one end of a lever and hang 
a weight of two ounces to its center, there will 
be a downward pressure of one ounce exerted 
on its free end. If we lift the free end through 
two inches, the center will be lifted but one 
inch. Here we have a power of one ounce lift- 
ing a weight of two ounces through one-half 
the distance which the one ounce of power 
moves. 

"It is evident that this same function might 
be performed by the pulley. If we fasten one 
end of the cord which passes over the pulley 



160 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

and attach one ounce to the other end, this one 
ounce will exert a downward pressure of two 
ounces on the pulley, and if the pulley be free 
to move, it will descend only one-half the dis- 
tance through which the weight at the free 
end of the cord moves. There is here a fixed 
ratio between power and weight and this ratio 
is inversely as the distances through which 
they move. The one is always just one-half of 
the other. If we wish to increase this ratio, 
we must increase the number of our pulleys. 

''We might, however, increase the ratio of 
power to weight by using a lever of unequal 
arms. If we support one end of a lever four 
inches long, and attach a weight of six ounces 
one inch from the point of support, the weight 
will exert a downward pressure of only one 
ounce at the free end of the lever. If we 
have a lever four inches long with the fulcrum 
one inch from the end, a weight of one ounce 
at the end of the long arm will balance a weight 
of three ounces at the end of the short arm. 

"If we rotate a lever of this sort around its 
fulcrum, its ends will describe two concentric 



The Development of the Lever 161 

circles, the radii of which are to each other 
as the respective lengths of the lever arms. If, 
now, two pulleys corresponding in size to the 
concentric circles be fastened together and made 
to rotate on a common axis, a weight of one 
ounce fastened to the cord which unwinds from 
the larger wheel will lift a weight of three 
ounces fastened to a cord which winds on the 
smaller wheel. We have here what is known 
in mechanics as the wheel and axle ; through its 
use the ratio of power to weight may be varied 
within wide limits. 

"It will not be necessary for me to impose 
upon your patience by asking you to listen to 
further explanations of the elements of me- 
chanics, or to the way in which they may be 
mastered even by the dullest of pupils, since 
the simple farm machinery that was familiar 
to my boyhood consisted for the most part 
of the lever, the pulley, and the wheel and 
axle combined in various ways and modified at 
times in the form of the eccentric and the crank- 
shaft." 



CHAPTER XVII 

Sense Experience and Literature 

"While Minnesota was still a part of the 
great north-west territory, there was dug on 
our farm a well, six by six and eighty-five feet 
deep. This was curbed with dressed sand- 
stone, which left a round open well that yielded 
an inexhaustible supply of delicious spring 
water, which soon earned for it an enviable 
reputation, even in that land of lakes. 

"A lattice with a projecting roof covered the 
well. A pulley such as I have just described 
was suspended from the center of the roof. 
Ninety feet of inch rope passing over this 
pulley with a pair of 'old oaken, iron-bound, 
moss-covered buckets' attached to the ends of it 
by means of a few feet of chain completed the 
apparatus for drawing water. 

"During my boyhood days the pump and 
windmill replaced the open well on the sur- 
rounding farms, but up to the day we left the 



Sense Experience and Literature 163 

old farm sentiment kept the old oaken bucket 
hanging in our well,, and nowhere else has 
water ever tasted so sweet to me as from its 
battered rim. 

"On opposite sides of the enclosing lattice- 
work two doors opened down to within three 
feet of the surrounding platform. I do not 
remember when I first drew water from the old 
well, but I have a vivid recollection of pulling 
on the wet rope when I was scarcely tall enough 
to reach it, and I remember, too, how tired I 
used to be before the seemingly endless rope 
finally brought the bucket to view. It frequent- 
ly happened that my sister helped me, one of 
us pulling down on the rope at one side of the 
well, while the other pulled up on the rope at 
the other side. 

"Looking back from this distance, I remem- 
ber that we had a clear realization of the fact 
that the bucket was heaviest at the bottom of 
the well, but we attributed this to the great 
depth of the well without suspecting that the 
weight of ninety feet of wet rope was added 
to the weight of the bucket of water at the 



164 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

beginning of its upward journey; and that this 
same heavy rope acted as a counterpoise as the 
bucket neared the surface. We fully realized 
the fact that it was much easier to pull down 
on the rope than to pull up on it, although I am 
very sure that neither of us suspected that this 
might b'e in any way connected with the habits 
of our remote ancestors. 

"Thus through their senses and their muscles 
children come to a realization of many truths 
in their concrete setting without troubling 
themselves to seek out the hidden springs of the 
results which most deeply interest them. Truth 
grows in their minds from germs of this sort 
and the full beauty and flower appear much 
later. 

"None of us could have written 'The Old 
Oaken Bucket/ but our experience with this 
well gave a depth and a meaning to the words 
of the poem quite unattainable by one whose 
childhood knew no similar experience. And 
few things call up more vivid recollections of 
my bovhood than the lines : 



Sense Experience and Literature 165 

'How dear to this heart are the scenes of my 
childhood, 
When fond recollection presents them to 
view! 
The orchard, the meadow, the deep-tangled 
wildwood, 
And every loved spot which my infancy 
knew; 
The wide-spreading pond, the mill which stood 
by it, 
The bridge, and the rock where the cataract 
fell; 
The cot of my father, the dairy-house nigh it, 
And e'en the rude bucket which hung in the 
well! 
The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, 
The moss-covered bucket, which hung in the 
well. 

'That moss-covered vessel I hail as a treasure; 

For often, at noon, when returned from the 
field, 
I found it the source of an exquisite pleasure, 

The purest and sweetest that nature can yield. 



1 66 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

How ardent I seized it, with hands that were 
glowing ; 
And quick to the white pebbled bottom it fell ; 
Then soon, with the emblem of truth over- 
flowing, 
And dripping with coolness, it rose from the 
well: 
The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, 
The moss-covered bucket that hung in the welL 

'How sweet from the green mossy brim to re- 
ceive it, 
As poised on the curb it inclined to my lips ! 
Not a full blushing goblet could tempt me to 
leave it, 
Though filled with the nectar that Jupiter 
sips. 
And now, far removed from the loved situa- 
tion, 
The tear of regret will intrusively swell, 
As fancy reverts to my father's plantation, 
And sighs for the bucket which hangs in the 
well; 
The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, 



Sense Experience and Literature 167 

The moss-covered bucket, which hangs in the 
well.' 

"Our early sense experiences, after all, deter- 
mine, in large measure, the meaning which liter- 
ature holds for us in after life." 

"That is true, Doctor," said Miss Ruth, "and 
any schoolroom may furnish pathetic instances 
of the meager content the child finds in even 
simple word pictures when he lacks the sense 
experience required to invest the picture with 
life and meaning. How little a child may get 
from this very poem that is so full of beauty 
and feeling for you, was illustrated the other 
day in a fourth grade room that I was visiting. 

"The class was studying the Old Oaken 
Bucket, and the children were told to illustrate 
with their crayons what the poem meant to 
them. One dear little girl, who had spent all 
of her ten years in a city and who had evi- 
dently never seen an open well, brought me her 
paper on which were sketched three wooden 
pails that differed from each other chiefly in 
color effects. The first was plain brown, the 



1 68 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

second had a series of black bands around it, 
and the third was covered in places with green 
fuzz. Towards the bottom of the paper there 
were a number of irregular color patches. 
When I asked her why she had three buckets, 
there was not a little of the child's pity for the 
ignorance of grown-ups in her ready answer, 
that one was the old oaken bucket, the next was 
the iron-bound bucket, and the third was the 
moss-covered bucket. And, when I sought en- 
lightenment on the meaning of the color 
patches, she looked up at me and replied, with 
a tone of triumph in her voice, 'they are all the 
loved spots which my infancy knew/ : 

"Wood-worth's poem must be responsible for 
similar experiences in many a schoolroom," 
said Professor Shannon. "Ten years ago I 
heard Miss Eliza Haley of Chicago tell of these 
'loved spots/ and Professor O'Shea has a simi- 
lar story in his Dynamic Factors of Education." 

"If I am not anticipating your story, Doc- 
tor," said the Judge, "I should like to ask 
whether you trace to literature like the 'Old 



Sense Experience and Literature 169 

Oaken Bucket' the beginning of your taste for 
books?" 

"No, literature of that order appeals only 
to the mature. The actual experience of child- 
hood and youth, such as that of drawing water 
from the old well, bear their rich fruit in later 
life. The child, the savage, and the undevel- 
oped generally, crave action and a play of the 
imagination. Fairy tales, detective stories, and 
the idealistic novel appeal to them rather than 
fine descriptions of familiar scenes and events. 
The mature find much of their enjoyment in 
the past ; the immature live in the indefinite fu- 
ture. The immature appreciate only action and 
large outlines ; the mature delight in subtle un- 
dercurrents, in the play of motives, and in ac- 
curacy of detail." 



CHAPTER XVIII 
A Ray of Hope 

"At the time of which I speak, I was sunk 
in such deep discouragement that I question 
whether any form of literature could have 
reached me. There was nothing in the past 
that interested me, and my horizon extended 
but little beyond my father's farm. I was 
wholly absorbed by the various employments 
in which I was engaged. Some measure of 
self-reliance, some little confidence in my own 
mental powers, was my one great need at that 
time, and this I finally attained through the 
mastery of the simple machinery with which 
I worked. 

"So long as we use a machine in the form 
in which it is given to us and for the attain- 
ment of only those ends which were contem- 
plated by its builder, the machine remains our 
master. Our mastery over the machine dates 



A Ray of Hope 171 

from the moment in which we learn to modify 
it and to adapt it to our purposes. 

"If I were lecturing on pedagogy instead of 
telling you how I came up out of the dark- 
ness, I would emphasize the fact that we have 
here reached a principle of universal applica- 
tion. It is as true of methods as it is of ma- 
chines; as long as we accept any method liter- 
ally and carry it out in all its details as it is. 
set forth by an authority, the method remains 
our master. Our control over the method dates 
from the time when we learn to modify it and 
to adjust it to each present situation. 

"But to return to my story. My early famil- 
iarity with simple machinery laid the sure 
foundations of my subsequent knowledge of 
mechanics; but it had another result of much 
greater value to me. My attempts to modify 
a few of the simple farm machines, produced 
in me the first discernible germ of self-re- 
liance, the dawn of faith in my own mental 
powers. 

"The first instance of this kind that I can 



172 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

recall occurred in my thirteenth year. In the 
morning, while the dew prevented us from 
gathering up the cured hay, it was my usual 
task to turn the grindstone on which the mow- 
ers sharpened their scythes. Now, a new grind- 
stone has a large diameter, and a low speed 
of the crank suffices; b'ut as the stone wears 
down to a small core, a progressive increase in 
speed is required for the attainment of satis- 
factory results, and this increase of speed adds 
considerably to a task which at best is tire- 
some. 

"One morning towards the close of the hay- 
ing season, when the stone was worn down to 
a small core, and the mowers were in a hurry, 
my patience reached its limit. The urgent haste 
and my tired muscles both cried out for a rem- 
edy, and the first suggestion of this remedy 
came to me from previous muscular exertions, 
which have, throughout all human progress, 
been the prolific source of inventions. 

"A device was needed that would cause the 
grindstone to revolve faster than the crank. 
I remembered that this end was actually at- 



A Ray of Hope 173 

tained in a fanning mill that I had spent many 
a long day in turning. The handle of the mill 
was attached to a large cogwheel, each revolu- 
tion of which caused a small pinion attached 
to the shaft of the fan to revolve several times. 
I there and then resolved to transfer the wheel 
and pinion from the discarded fanning mill 
to the grindstone. 

"When, some days later, I attempted to carry 
out this resolution, I failed completely ; and my 
failure brought down upon my head the ridi- 
cule that greeted all my attempts to depart 
from the trodden paths. But there was a note- 
worthy difference in my mental attitude on this 
occasion from that which followed former fail- 
ures. In this instance I had obtained a clear 
view of a mechanical truth that neither failure 
nor ridicule could obscure. 

"I did not realize all the elements in my fail- 
ure. It seemed to me to be wholly due to 
my lack of mechanical skill in carrying out my 
idea, and indeed this was the chief cause cf 
my failure. The bearings on which the axle 
of the grindstone turned were of such a nature 



174 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

that they would not hold the shaft in position 
in the new arrangement. As soon as I at- 
tempted to turn the grindstone, the pinion 
slipped away from the larger wheel, and, at 
that time, I had not sufficient ingenuity to de- 
vise a method that would hold the shaft of the 
grindstone at the requisite distance from the 
shaft of the larger wheel. 

"Had there been a mechanic present, he 
might have pointed out another source of fail- 
ure that would have remained, even had I suc- 
ceeded in remedying the defect of which I was 
conscious. The large wheel was fully ten times 
as large as the small one, consequently the stone 
would have to turn ten rounds to each round of 
the crank, which is too high a speed for the 
power available in a boy's arm. 

"It was fortunate for me that no one 
pointed out the various shortcomings in 
my device, for that would probably have 
discouraged me from further attempts in 
the same direction. As it was, I could see 
only one cause of failure, and my mind busied 
itself with seeking a remedy for this. 



A Ray of Hope 175 

"There was another grindstone on the farm, 
an heirloom of territorial days, which was used 
only for rough work, such as grinding grub- 
hoes and axes. It had been hewn from a large 
block of sandstone at the time the masons 
were curbing the well. It weighed several 
hundred pounds. The shaft was made in a 
forge and it turned in metal boxes. I trans- 
ferred the wheel and pinion to this grindstone 
and succeeded, with strenuous efforts, in caus- 
ing the grindstone to revolve at a very high 
speed, but of course the least pressure on the 
stone acted as a brake and rendered it impos- 
sible for me to keep it in motion. Besides, the 
rapid rotation soon shook the old wooden 
frame to pieces. 

"It was another failure, but the failure was 
not complete. I had actually accomplished 
what I set out to do, that is, I had made the 
grindstone turn, and turn rapidly, and I be- 
lieved that the failure to secure permanent re- 
sults was due, in large measure, to the great 
weight of the grindstone; besides, I had inci- 
dentally come upon the play of inertia and the 



176 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

function of a balance wheel in mechanics. Nev- 
ertheless, this second failure and the ridicule 
that accompanied it made me pause, and more 
than two years elapsed before my next attempt 
to become an inventor." 



CHAPTER XIX 
Judicious Praise 

''Doctor, didn't your efforts to improve the 
grindstone make your people realize that there 
were better things in store for you?" asked 
Mrs. O'Brien. 

"No, I am afraid not. Of course it is easy 
enough for us now, in the light of subsequent 
developments, to recognize in these first crude 
attempts the awakening of my mind; but to 
those around me then, who had settled con- 
victions of long standing concerning the lim- 
itations of my intelligence, it could scarcely 
have seemed a creditable achievement merely 
to shake to pieces the frame of the old grind- 
stone without obtaining any practical results. 

"A word of praise at that time or an appre- 
ciation, however slight, of the thought I was 
endeavoring to work out would have been 
grateful to me and it would probably have 



178 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

hastened my development along mechanical 
lines. But, after all, I question whether it was 
not better as it was. Premature praise often 
proves mischievous, particularly when it tends 
to produce a forced growth. I feel sure that 
it was fortunate for me that the seeds of me- 
chanical truths planted in my mind by these 
early experiments, were allowed to germinate 
there undisturbed. As it turned out, they grew 
and bore abundant fruit in due season." 

"Don't you believe in praising children for 
their partial successes, Doctor?" asked Miss 
Russell. "I have often heard you say that you 
are opposed to premiums and to punishments 
for children; and if you refuse the teacher the 
privilege of praising them, what incentive has 
she to offer to induce them to study?" 

"I do believe in praise, Miss Russell, but I do 
not believe in premature or injudicious praise. 
It requires no mean skill and the greatest care 
on the part of the teacher to mete out due 
praise to the children for worthy achievements 
without thereby lifting praise into a motive 
for their future actions, which would be fatal 
to their best interests. 



Judicious Praise 179 

"The best development of mind and heart 
can be attained only when external motives 
are reduced to a minimum or when they are 
excluded altogether. There is no real progress 
in intellectual life until the delight in the dis- 
covery of truth becomes the controlling mo- 
tive; just as there is no real goodness until 
conduct is governed by love of God and fellow- 
man. Is not this what our Saviour meant when 
He said, 'Do ye good, therefore, hoping for 
nothing thereby, and your reward shall be 
very great' ? 

"The injudicious praise I had in mind just 
now inflicts an injury of a different sort on the 
growing mind. By praising the child for his 
success along some one line we are liable there- 
by to concentrate all his efforts in that direc- 
tion. Now, an early concentration of effort 
in one direction results in too narrow a basis 
for good mental development, even in the 
chosen branch. Where this occurs the mature 
mind will be found lacking in balance and sym- 
metry. The man may become a specialist, but 
he will have all the narrowness and the lack 
of insight into the broader affairs of life that 



180 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

so frequently characterize the technical ex- 
pert." 

"It would be interesting to know what praise 
you do believe in," said the Professor, "since 
praising children for their successes results, ac- 
cording to your theories, in making praise the 
motive of their subsequent endeavors, and this 
you say would exclude them from the higher 
realms of life. And, on the other hand, by 
praising children for success along some one 
line we are liable to destroy balance in their 
development and to produce narrow minded 
cranks." 

"I have already said, Professor, that I re- 
gard it as one of the teacher's most difficult 
tasks to mete out judicious praise to the chil- 
dren for whose mental and moral development 
she is responsible. In my remarks just now 
I intended to indicate the two ways in which 
the unskilled teacher is most likely to fail in 
the performance of her duty. It is, indeed, no 
easy matter to so praise a child as to increase 
his joy in the achievement itself, yet it is not 
impossible. But praise too frequently results 



Judicious Praise 181 

in turning the child away from his ideal of per- 
fection in the chosen field and in making him 
seek the teacher's commendation instead. Such 
praise transforms the child of the kingdom 
into the hireling. 

"Again, it is one of the teacher's chief duties 
to preserve balance in the child's developmental 
tendencies. But when she praises him for 
successes in the lines in which his talents are 
most pronounced she is exaggerating his asym- 
metry instead of correcting it. The teacher 
should constantly endeavor to awaken the 
child's interest and to stimulate his efforts in 
those directions in which he exhibits the least 
natural tendency to develop. Judicious praise 
is here an invaluable aid in restoring and pre- 
serving balance in the child's mental develop- 
ment. I am convinced that we seldom praise 
a child for his efforts along the line of his 
chief talent without thereby injuring him. 

"Had my attempts to improve the grind- 
stone met with appreciation and applause, I 
might have become a mechanic, but all the 
wider development that actually came to me in 



1 82 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

after years would have been excluded. I was 
then living in a state of chronic discourage- 
ment and, had my crude attempts at invention 
brought me the praise for which my whole 
being hungered, all my energy would have 
been directed into this one narrow channel, and 
other elements that were quite essential for 
the full development of even my mechanical 
power would have been omitted. 

"As it was, I was more keenly conscious 
of failure than I was of success. Indeed, the 
only success that appeared to me was a rather 
hazy figure in the background; I had gained 
an abiding conviction, in spite of the imme- 
diate failures, that my plans would work if 
properly carried out. Nevertheless, the fail- 
ures were the things I most keenly felt, and 
they served to check for a time the tendency 
to develop in this direction. 

"During the two years that followed my 
mind was chiefly occupied with the develop- 
ment of the number concept in connection 
with the sacking and hauling of grain and 
with the development of spatial relationships 



Judicious Praise 183 

in the measurement of lumber. I have already 
given you an account of these developmental 
phases. These three lines of development, over- 
lapped and blended in many ways, formed the 
basis of my subsequent mental life." 



CHAPTER XX 

The Dance of the Moonbeams 

w The year 1878 was a memorable one in mv 
life. It was during this year that the first 
ray of hope penetrated the gloom of discour- 
agement in which I lived. As a matter of fact, 
my mind had been steadily growing during 
the two or three preceding years, but the mani- 
festations of this growth were such as to es- 
cape recognition by those interested in me ; and 
nothing would have surprised me more at the 
time than to be told that my mind was awaken- 
ing and giving promise of a development that 
would one day make me the equal of the farm 
lads of the neighborhood. Indeed, I believe 
there was no time during the seven years 
that had gone before in which I had a more 
poignant conviction of my mental incapacity 
than during the few months preceding the 
completion of my sixteenth year. This was 
probably due to the fact that my awakening 



The Dance of the Moonbeams 185 

mind was beginning to compare my own con- 
dition, or the estimate in which I was held by 
others, with the positions of those around me, 
who were credited with the possession of nor- 
mal faculties. 

"It was during this year also that my taste 
for reading was awakened ; but this line of de- 
velopment proceeded slowly and had no part 
in my first mental successes which were clearly 
traceable to a nucleus of growth organized out 
of experiences derived through my muscles and 
sense of touch. 

"My mind, hemmed in by the narrow hori- 
zon of one debarred from the realm of letters, 
busied itself in combining and re-combining 
memory pictures that had b'een gained through 
these fundamental senses; and thus there was 
laid the foundation of a constructive imagina- 
tion which I still number among my most 
valued mental possessions. " 

"But, Doctor, were you not endeavoring to 
spell out some puzzle, or to work out some 
mechanical scheme ?" asked Miss Ruth. "You 
surely do not mean that the mere aimless play 



1 86 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

of imagination, day-dreaming, leads to valuable 
results !" 

"Day-dreaming played an important part in 
rescuing me from dullarddom, but I would be 
very sorry, merely on this account, to give un- 
qualified endorsement to every day-dreamer. 
There is day-dreaming and day-dreaming, you 
know. The wise man in his silence has often 
been likened to the fool, but the likeness is 
superficial. The one is silent because he deems 
it unwise to express his thought; the other is 
silent because he has no thought to express. 

"The lax muscles and the vacant stare of the 
dawdler should not be accepted as prima facie 
evidence of day-dreaming, or, if so, we are in 
need of some other term to designate that con- 
dition of mind, so characteristic of the frontiers 
of thought, in which the attention is wholly 
absorbed by the play of eager elements of men- 
tal growth and in which mere sentient phe- 
nomena are transfigured by the light of truth. 

"^he consideration of day-dreams of this 
sort brings me back to an August evening 
spent on the Mississippi river some years ago. I 



The Dance of the Moonbeams 187 

was leaning over the rail on the deck of the City 
of Dubuque watching the wave that was being 
molded by the prow of the boat on the smooth 
surface of the river. As this wave receded ob- 
liquely toward the neighboring bank it stole a 
broad band of silver from the full harvest moon 
and bent it to its form in Hogarth's line of 
beauty. This band lengthened and shortened, 
softened and accentuated its curves from mo- 
ment to moment, as the boat, veering in its 
course, presented the wave to the moonbeam 
in a constantly changing angle. As I looked 
back from this unbroken band of silver light 
to a bend in the river a mile distant, I was 
captivated by a veritable dance of the sprites. 
The waves formed by the prow of the boat, 
impinging upon the uneven banks, were re- 
flected at widely divergent angles ; they crossed 
and recrossed, breaking up into a thousand 
rounded fragments, each of which caught a 
moonbeam and whirled with it in an elfin dance 
of exquisite beauty." 

"The parable, Doctor, give us the parable," 
said Professor Shannon. "I had counted on. 



1 88 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

being at home before this time, but of course 
I never would be forgiven if I left without 
the moral that is to adorn your tale." 

"Patience, Professor, or if you feel that you 
must leave us, I will promise you a ready 
pardon. But the parable is this : the unbroken 
waves formed by the prow of the boat are the 
primary mental pictures born of the contact 
of mind with matter through the channels of 
sense. The curved bands of moonlight impris- 
oned in the receding waves are the glimpses 
of truth from beyond the realm of matter that 
reach the mind through these pictures. The 
length of the imprisoned- band of moonlight 
and the sharpness or softness of its curves de- 
pend on the angle of vision even as divergent 
points of view give varied meanings to similar 
sense experiences. 

"Now, the elfin dance of the waves and the 
moonbeams is the day-dream that has ever 
preceded the exact formulation of human 
knowledge. The play of fecund memory pic- 
tures, born of the embrace of mind and matter, 
has ever been man's inspiration in the con- 



The Dance of the Moonbeams 189 

quest of truth. In this apparently aimless 
play of combining memory pictures the mind 
catches glimpses of b'eauty and hints of unre- 
vealed truths that rouse the whole man to the 
eager and persistent effort in pursuit that has 
ever marked the artist and the discoverer in 
the fields of pure science." 



CHAPTER XXI 

A Day-Dream 

"Doctor," said Miss Ruth, "I am sure we 
all feel grateful to you for the beautiful illus- 
tration of day-dreaming you gave us last Fri- 
day evening, so I cannot regret having asked 
the question that I did ; but don't forget, please, 
that we are anxiously waiting for you to tell 
us how day-dreaming helped you to come up 
out of the gloom." 

"No, I have not forgotten, Miss Ruth; I 
had, in reality, intended to tell you that story 
the other evening, but Professor Shannon got 
frightened at the moonbeams and broke up the 
meeting. 

"The day-dream is seldom articulate enough 
to issue in language; it is thought in embryo, 
and it should see the light of day in action 
before being clothed in words. Its soft out- 
lines rapidly fade from memory unless they be- 
come shaply defined in some concrete embodi- 
ment. 



A Day-Dream 191 

"In the summer of 1878 I had a day-dream 
that issued almost immediately in practical re- 
sults of the greatest importance to me. In 
this circumstance may be found the explana- 
tion of the fact that even the smallest details 
of that day-dream are still clearly and indelibly 
stamped upon my memory. 

"It was early June, my brother and I were 
hauling timothy hay to market. For eight 
miles our road wound along the margin of the 
high bluff on the right bank of the Mississippi. 
My team — Jenny, a large dun-colored mule that 
had been dismissed by the government ten 
years previously on account of old age and 
rheumatic joints, and Lame Jack, a big bay 
draft horse that had acquired a stiff leg and 
a swollen knee during one of his many win- 
ter campaigns in the northern pineries — fol- 
lowed slowly along behind my brother's load, 
from which they munched contentedly. 

"Do you ever in your dreams obtain a point 
of vantage from which you view yourself and 
study your emotions and your actions as if they 
belonged to some one else, preserving all the 



192 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

while that curious double consciousness that 
makes you at once the observed and the ob- 
server? If so, you will readily understand my 
difficulty in choosing between the first and the 
third person whenever I speak of the lad as 
he sat on the load of hay that bright June 
morning. 

"He has just completed his sixteenth year, 
but his five feet, ten inches make him look much 
older. His one hundred and sixty-five pounds 
are so well disposed in his strongly built frame 
that there is no appearance of superfluous flesh. 
Looking at him in his loose, well-worn brown 
jeans, as he sits tailor fashion on the load of 
hay, his head sunk between his shoulders and 
his muscles lax, you will be likely to underesti- 
mate both his height and his weight. The 
dreamy brown eyes are overshadowed by lux- 
uriant auburn brows ; a broad forehead is par- 
tially revealed beneath the brim of a battered 
straw hat; the nose is large and strong, but 
the lower part of the face gives an impression 
of weakness. This impression, however, is not 
due to the chin which is in reality large and 



A Day-Dream 193 

strong, but to the lack of muscle tonus which 
causes the mouth to hang open habitually and 
the lower lip to protrude. 

"As the team reaches the top of Pilot Knob, 
an elevation of some five hundred feet above 
the river, the view which greets the eye of 
the beholder is one of surpassing beauty. On 
every side well tilled fields, big with the prom- 
ise of the coming harvest, stretch away over 
the undulating ground to the encircling hori- 
zon. Beneath, on the opposite side of the river, 
St. Paul lies spread out over a group of low 
hills; to the northwest the spires and chim- 
neys of Minneapolis stand out against the blue 
of the summer sky; to the left you look down 
into the broad expanse of the Minnesota val- 
ley where for thirty miles the eye follows the 
river as it meanders between its wooded banks. 
In the foreground, two hundred feet beneath 
you, Fort Snelling crowns the high promon- 
tory that marks the spot from which in ages 
past the Mississippi leapt over the precipice into 
the bed of the Minnesota three hundred feet 
below. Here the two mighty rivers still em- 



194 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

brace for a brief moment before separating, to 
meet again below the large and densely wooded 
island formed from the rock and sand dug 
out of the ancient river bed by the Falls of 
St. Anthony, and blend in a union that shall 
know no further parting. 

"But the magnificent lines of the landscape 
and the delicate tints of the wild rose by the 
wayside are equally lost on this boy who sits 
dreaming on the top of his load of timothy in 
the June sunshine. He is enveloped in a men- 
tal atmosphere that is alike impervious to the 
joyous song of the bob-o-link in his hedge of 
hazel and briar, and to the lazy drone of the 
bee returning to his hive, laden with the spoils 
of the clover field. 

"Out of the rich and fecund sense experience 
gained through muscle and sense of touch in 
the plowing and in the seeding, in the meadow 
and in the harvest field, he is building a mental 
world of his own, crude and undeveloped if 
you will, but filled with the vigor of unmolested 
natural growth. 

"You may revisit the scene at will. Pilot 



A Day-Dream 195 

Knob still looks down upon it from his com- 
manding height. On a bright June morning 
you may still hear the breezes playing a slow 
wedding march in the surrounding hills, while 
the Minnesota river, like a fair young bride, 
lingers in many a winding curve and with 
many a backward glance to her peaceful valley 
home, kissing the weeping willows and mur- 
muring farewells to the rushes, leaning caress- 
ingly on her sheltering banks, as she moves 
forward with sweet reluctance to join the im- 
petuous bridegroom coming to meet her, leap- 
ing in the cataract and foaming with impatience 
in the rapids. 

"The Twin Cities have grown apace ; but the 
contour of the landscape remains practically un- 
changed through the lapsing years. But of the 
inner world in which the boy lived, moved, and 
had his being on that other June morning 
twenty years ag'o, there is no record save that 
inscribed on the tablets of my memory." 



CHAPTER XXII 

A New Problem 

"I have repeatedly scrutinized each circum- 
stance and event of that spring in the hope of 
discovering the immediate antecedents of my 
day-dream, but always with the same negative 
result. I have ceased to be surprised at this. 
The thought has grown upon me that we should 
look to a more remote past for the stuff of 
which our dreams are made, even as we go 
back through the long, bleak months of win- 
ter to find the source of the color and fragrance 
of the apple blossoms in the garnered sun- 
beams of the previous summer. 

"In those days each farmer swore by his own 
reaper and discussed its points of superiority at 
the crossroads, in the market place, or around 
the church doors of a Sunday morning. My 
brothers were loyal to Wood's Chain-Rake 
Reaper. No other machine was so light run- 
ning; no other dropped so neat a bundle. The 



A New Problem 197 

agents of the McCormick or the Champion had 
soon discovered that it was useless to talk their 
wares at our place. 

"In my eyes Wood's Chain-Rake Reaper 
was the embodiment of mechanical perfection. 
It had not occurred to me that by taking 
thought I might add one cubit to its stature. 
In fact an attempt on my part to improve this 
Paragon of Perfection would have seemed to 
me presumption so colossal as to render me a 
fit subject for the insane asylum. And yet, 
on that morning my mind was obsessed by 
Wood's Chain-Rake Reaper. 

"From the time I was a child of seven 
until my weight became too great to be added 
to the horse's load, it was my task during each 
harvest to drive the pair of leaders on my 
brother's reaper. I rode bareback on the nigh 
horse, and every time the reaper broke down, 
and it broke down pretty often in those days, 
I jumped from the horse's back and helped 
Bernard to make repairs. Sometimes I held 
the sickle-bar while he riveted on a new sec- 
tion, or again I helped him to replace a broken 



198 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

link in the rake-chain; at times it was even 
necessary for me to crawl under the machine 
and lie on my back on the ground so as to hold 
a bolt firmly with a big monkey wrench while 
he unscrewed its stubborn nut. 

"My ear soon came to recognize unerringly 
the sound of a loose nut or of a broken sickle 
section. Every wheel and journal, every bolt 
and screw of the machine reached my conscious- 
ness through ear and eye, through muscle and 
sense of touch. In fact, during my childhood, 
Wood's Chain-Rake Reaper laid hold of all my 
senses and filled my imagination. To me it was 
the symbol of harvest. It was the heart of 
those few bustling, anxious days on which 
the fruitage of the whole year's toil depended, 
and it naturally became the center of my con- 
scious life during the silent years that fol- 
lowed, assimilating the elements of mental life 
derived through all other forms of sense ex- 
perience. 

"The discouragement resulting from my 
failures to improve upon the grindstone pre- 
vented me from seeking to embody in concrete 



A New Problem 199 

form the mental life that from day to day was 
growing in vigor and that finally held my 
imagination captive in the day-dream. 

"The habit of day-dreaming into which I had 
fallen during my sixteenth year did not at the 
time seem to me to have any value. I was not 
seeking to invent anything, nor did it ever oc- 
cur to me to attribute to the habit an educa- 
tive value. Whenever present circumstances 
ceased to hold my attention I simply could not 
keep my imagination from playing with the 
various parts of the machines with which I 
had grown familiar. 

"On the morning of which I speak, I had 
practically nothing to do during the two hours 
occupied by our trip to town. I simply sat idle 
in the sunshine on the top of my load of tim- 
othy and let my horses follow my brother's 
load. I did not need to touch a line until we 
reached the crowded city streets. 

"It is not easy, however, to trace the imme- 
diate source of my dream on that occasion. 
Several weeks of sunshine and of shower must 
intervene before the green fields of early June 



200 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

will be converted into the golden harvest. Nor 
have I ever been able to discover any reason 
why Wood's Chain-Rake Reaper should have 
dominated my day-dream on that particular 
morning; the reapers had not been touched 
since they had been dismantled and backed into 
their places in the machine shed after deliver- 
ing to the tired binders the last sheaves of the 
preceding harvest. 

"But I remember distinctly that, as we 
reached the top of Pilot Knob, my imagination 
was occupied in following the motion of the 
drive wheel through the train of wheels and 
spur gearing to the sprocket wheel that drove 
the rake. My imagination held each wheel re- 
volving in its place and traced each reversal of 
motion in the gearing until it finally rested 
satisfied in the picture of the rake traveling 
round the platform and always in the right 
direction. 

"Having exhausted this material, my imagi- 
nation busied itself for a time in picturing the 
relative velocities of the several rotating wheels. 
I found this task more difficult and the results 



A New Problem 201 

less satisfactory. The sizes of the wheels were 
such as to involve the use of fractions ; so, after 
a short time, I turned my attention to another 
part of the machine and confined my efforts to 
an attempt to picture the number of times the 
sickle moved to and fro to each revolution of 
the drive wheel. 

"As I did not know how to multiply or di- 
vide, I found no little difficulty in working out 
this problem. The pinion which mashed with 
the drive wheel was about one-eighth of its size. 
I imagined the circumference of the little wheel 
spread out and applied to the rim of the larger 
wheel, and thus easily reached the conclusion 
that the smaller wheel revolved eight times 
to each revolution of the larger one. Keyed to 
the shaft of the smaller wheel there was a large 
bevel gear which turned a pinion about one- 
ninth of its own size. The axle of this pinion 
terminated in a crank shaft which drove the 
sickle. I readily pictured the movement of each 
of these parts of the machine, but my inability 
to multiply nine by eight prevented me from 
discovering the number of times the crank 



202 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard' 

shaft revolved to each revolution of the drive 
wheel. 

"Baffled here, I began at the other end of 
the problem. I saw in imagination each revo- 
lution of the crank shaft and counted the revo- 
lutions until they resulted in one complete revo- 
lution of the bevel gear. Then I continued this 
process, while with the other mental eye, as it 
were, I watched the small gear creep slowly 
around the circumference of the drive wheel, 
until I was able to picture in imagination the 
one hundred and forty-four strokes of the 
sickle that corresponded to a single revolution 
of the drive wheel. 

"The number was, of course, only an ap- 
proximation, and in this respect there was still 
lacking something which could be supplied only 
by actual measurement or by actual counting 
of the teeth in the four wheels involved. But 
this did not prevent the element of success 
in my endeavor from diffusing through my 
mind a glow of satisfaction which lifted it for 
a brief moment to a higher plane, where it 



A New Problem 203 

found in an incident of the previous harvest 
a new problem. 

"I had been binding, and had stepped aside 
to let the reaper pass. The grade was steep 
and the horses were drawing the reaper down 
the hill at full speed, when a little dry twig 
caught in the sickle and locked the whole ma- 
chine. The drive wheel dug into the soft earth 
and the heavy pole team broke their double- 
tree. 

"The picture of the one hundred and forty- 
four strokes of the sickle to each revolution of 
the drive wheel brought this incident vividly to 
mind and I felt that in some way velocity and 
power were connected, though I did not know 
the meaning of the words Velocity' and 'pow- 
er' at that time. I wondered whether or not 
it was true that because one round of the 
drive wheel produced one hundred and forty- 
four strokes of the sickle, one pound of re- 
sistance in the sickle would hold out against 
one hundred and forty-four pounds of power 
in the drive wheel. 

"I was unable to reach a conclusion as to 



204 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

whether or not this was so, but I felt that if it 
was so, by taking hold of the wrist of the 
crank shaft I should be able to turn it with 
ease while it caused the machine to move for- 
ward or backward. Satisfied that this would 
be a crucial test of the accuracy of my con- 
clusion, I resolved to try the experiment on 
my return home. That same evening I went 
to the machine shed and found, to my great 
delight, that by turning the crank-shaft I could 
easily move the reaper forward or backward 
on the shed floor." 



CHAPTER XXIII 
The Builders of Science 

"A memorandum left by Henry Cavendish 
shows that this distinguished chemist, in deal- 
ing with a volume of atmospheric nitrogen, 
found in it a small residuum that was more in- 
ert than the rest of the gas and that did not 
behave as nitrogen should. The science of 
chemistry was not sufficiently developed in his 
day to reveal to him the meaning of the un- 
usual behavior of the gas which remained in 
his tube. He died without having suspected 
that this inert gas was a hitherto undiscovered 
element. 

"In 1894, one hundred years after this ex- 
periment, this same gas was again isolated in 
the tubes of a thoroughly trained chemist. But 
a century of development in the science of 
chemistry had wrought its changes and enabled 
the modern chemist to understand phenomena 
that were meaningless to Cavendish. 



2o6 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

"Raleigh had not set out in search of a new 
element. He was engaged in redetermining 
the atomic weight of nitrogen, with a view to 
shedding light on the so-called Periodic Law, 
when he found that the atomic weight of the 
nitrogen obtained from the atmosphere was 
somewhat greater than that of nitrogen pre- 
pared from the nitrates. 

"The highly developed state of modern 
chemistry gave this difference in atomic 
weights, which was so slight that it did not 
appear until the fourth decimal place was 
reached, a significance which it could not have 
had for Cavendish. 

"That the atomic weight should be affected, 
ever so little, by the source from which the ele- 
ment had been prepared, was so inconsistent 
with modern theory that it led at once to an in- 
vestigation in which the fact was discovered 
that the gas prepared from the atmosphere, and 
supposed to be pure nitrogen, was in reality a 
mixture of nitrogen with a small percentage of 
another very similar gas that differed from ni- 
trogen chiefly in its greater atomic weight and 



The Builders of Science 207 

in its greater inertness. From this latter quality 
the newly discovered element derived its name, 
argon." 

"Excuse me, Doctor," said the Professor. 
""All this about the discovery of argon is doubt- 
less very interesting to chemists; but I must 
have been napping and lost the connection, for 
I can't see what on earth it has to do with 
day-dreaming, or with the reclamation of the 
dullard, unless you mean to suggest that the 
dullard later on became the discoverer of ar- 
gon. But argon was discovered in England, 
wasn't it?" 

"Ah, Professor, your day is coming. Old 
age is creeping up your backbone as well as 
mine and it will one day be leading you off 
also in these long, irrelevant stretches. But 
bear with my rambling for a little. I am com- 
ing to the point presently. I merely wanted to 
call attention to the fact that men like your- 
self, who are ahead of their time, accomplish 
little or nothing in the building of the science 
which they represent. They deserve no credit. 
Moreover they are not all so prudent and mod- 



208 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

est as Cavendish, and they seldom content 
themselves with merely recording the facts and 
passing on. 

"The greatest enemy of human progress has 
ever been the man who is too far ahead of his 
time, and who, craving notoriety, prematurely 
announces discoveries that neither himself nor 
his contemporaries are prepared to incorporate 
into the body of organized knowledge. When 
these 'martyrs of science' go forth and insist 
upon the acceptance of newly-made theories to 
explain their unverified discoveries, they clog 
the avenues of progress. 

"Cavendish had argon in his tubes and noted 
its most characteristic quality, inertness, and 
yet by this discovery he added not one iota to 
the development of chemistry. Neither he nor 
his contemporary chemists were ready to deal 
with the facts in the case. To Cavendish, in 
this instance, belongs the credit of the faithful 
witness who simply records what he does not 
understand, and thus blazes the path for those 
who may come after. 

"Men who stumble upon important truths on 



The Builders of Science 209 

the frontiers of a growing science should be 
given due credit for these 'accidental discover- 
ies' if they bring the truths in question before 
those who are competent to deal with them, and 
help to incorporate them into the body of ascer- 
tained knowledge. Every science is in large 
measure made up of discoveries of this nature. 

"But in the advance of human knowledge the 
highest credit belongs only to the man who 
makes deliberate discoveries. The accidental 
discovery brings increase of knowledge, while 
deliberate discovery brings not only increase 
of knowledge, but, what is of much greater 
value, it brings confirmation to the principles 
and theories involved and also brings to the 
discoverer faith in his own powers. 

"Here, Professor, is where we return to the 
dullard. If I have in any measure succeeded 
in placing before you the condition of this boy, 
you will readily understand that his one su- 
preme need at the time was faith in his own 
mental powers. He rejoiced in his physical 
strength, which, to some extent, sweetened life 
for him and rendered it endurable. 



210 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

"It is true that his mental faculties had been 
unfolding for two or three years, but of this he 
had no suspicion. He had not yet escaped from 
the deep gloom and the discouragement that 
had settled down over him in consequence of 
early failures and early rejections. He still 
lived on under the old crushing conviction that 
he had no brains and never would have any. 
And yet he craved for some assurance of his 
mental power, even as the thirsty desert craves 
for water. 

"When the heavy reaper moved over the shed 
floor that evening in response to the touch of 
his hand on the crank shaft, and thus confirmed 
his day-dream concerning the relation of power 
to motion, he slacked his thirst for the first 
time at the unfailing fountain of purest joy set 
up by the Creator for the exclusive refreshment 
of those who seek the truth and find it." 



CHAPTER XXIV 
Rediscovering Fundamental Truths 

"If I were not afraid of being mobbed," said 
the Professor, "I should ask Dr. Studevan to 
repeat his magic trick of last Friday evening. 
Dispensing with Aladdin's lamp and the genii, 
in the twinkle of an eye, he lifts a dullard to 
a place among the immortals beside Newton 
and Pasteur. 

"The boy is so stupid all day that he fails 
to understand what is going on about him or 
to appreciate the beauty of his surroundings. 
He hasn't enough energy, even in the morning, 
to sit up straight and attend to his team; but 
when he comes home in the evening all tired 
out, he goes to the shed, turns a crank on an 
old machine, and presto! he is a discoverer, 
privileged to drink from the fountain of re- 
freshment reserved from the foundation of the 
world for those who make new conquests in the 
realm of truth!" 



212 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

"I thought you were suffering from brain- 
fag last Friday evening, Professor. Or was it 
sleep too long delayed ? Your mind could not 
have been in its usual form or you would not 
have so completely missed my meaning. 

"I did not say, nor did I wish to imply, that 
the boy made any contribution to physical 
science. It is obvious that he had a long road 
to travel before that would have been possible 
to him. But he thought out for himself the 
relation of power to weight in a simple gearing 
and verified his conclusions by actual experi- 
ment. As far as he was personally concerned, 
this was an original discovery, and for his men- 
tal life it had all the value of an original dis- 
covery, and it yielded him all the joy of one, 
and this, notwithstanding the fact that the 
truth in question was regarded as elementary 
ages before he was born. 

"A study of the causes that led to the rise 
and fall of kingdoms and of empires in the past, 
will make it evident to any thoughtful student 
that the great benefactors of the race have not 
been the original discoverers in the fields of 



Rediscovering Fundamental Truths 213 

science who merely add the latest items to the 
sum of human knowledge ; they have ever been 
the men who cause each generation to redis- 
cover for itself the great fundamental truths 
that constitute the life-blood of every civiliza- 
tion. 

"No one should be more familiar with this 
truth than the Professor. The sociologist, of 
all men, should know the tendency of each 
generation to occupy itself with the latest de- 
velopments along all lines, and to accept, with- 
out realizing their nature or their value, the 
truths and the institutions bequeathed to it by 
preceding generations. The history of by-gone 
civilizations reveals the fact that in this ten- 
dency lie the seeds of disintegration. The 
branch does not long survive the neglected and 
decaying root. 

"It has often been said that in mental life, as 
in physical life, ontogeny is the recapitulation 
of phylogeny. What history has shown to be 
true of the rise and fall of nations, genetic 
psychology finds repeated in each individual 
life. It is this truth, perhaps more than any 



214 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

other, that justifies the individual laboratory 
method which now obtains in all departments 
of scientific instruction. 

"The pupil who is to be formed for effective 
work, either in the fields of original investiga- 
tion or in the provinces of applied science, must 
not be allowed to content himself with accept- 
ing the mere statement of fundamental scientific 
truths. He must work out for himself and ver- 
ify each great fundamental truth in his chosen 
field of science. In this way his knowledge 
becomes vital, his perceptive powers are quick- 
ened, his range of view is broadened, and he 
acquires resourcefulness in dealing with com- 
plex problems and self-reliance in the presence 
of difficulty. 

"When an attempt is made to lead the pupil 
to the desired goal by a more direct route and 
when mere instruction is substituted for indi- 
vidual work, the student, at the end of his 
course, finds himself in possession of a set of 
sterile formulae instead of being the master of 
a developed science. 

"Lest the Professor should again misunder- 



Rediscovering Fundamental Truths 215 

stand me, let me emphasize the obvious truth 
that if the pupil were denied all assistance and 
left entirely to his own resources all scientific 
progress would be at an end. 

"The pathway of science is too long and it is 
beset by too many difficulties to be traversed 
alone by any one individual. It would be ab- 
surd to suppose that the efforts of a single life- 
time would suffice, even for the most highly en- 
dowed among the children of men, to accom- 
plish a work that is the result of the co-opera- 
tion of countless generations of the world's 
greatest thinkers. 

"Libraries, schools and teachers are set apart 
by society for the express purpose of transmit- 
ting to each pupil the accumulated inheritance 
of his race. But this does not mean that the 
pupil may set aside the laws and the constitu- 
tion of his own nature wherein it is written 
that he must pass through each successive de- 
velopmental phase before reaching the plane of 
adult mental life. 

"The agencies set apart by society to aid the 
pupil in his progress should keep him from 



2i6 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

wasting his energies in futile endeavors and 
from wandering in devious ways; they should 
place before him in their proper sequence the 
problems which he must solve for himself; 
they should place within his reach the means 
by which he may extricate himself from his 
perplexities. If these agencies perform their 
functions properly, the pupil will, in his few 
short years of school life, cover ground that 
would require centuries of unaided effort. 

"If this preachment has led me too far afield, 
you must blame the Professor for it. At the 
time in my life of which I have been speaking 
I had been left practically to my own resources 
for a period of about seven years. During 
this time I was away from school; the world 
of books was closed to me ; I had no teachers ; 
the people around me were, in my imagination, 
'denizens of a higher world who possessed 
brains and who had had the advantages of an 
education and I did not expect them to under- 
stand my difficulties nor to engage in any futile 
attempts to lift a brainless boy to the mental 
plane on which they lived. 



Rediscovering Fundamental Truths 217 

"Years were consumed in taking the first few 
steps on the long road of knowledge. Through 
the expenditure of my muscular energy and 
through daily contact with the simple forms of 
elementary machinery I had, however, suc- 
ceeded in incorporating into my mental life a 
few of the most rudimentary concepts of phys- 
ical science. These were now integrating them- 
selves in my day-dreams as I followed the plow 
or drove my team to market. 

"In the day-rdream which I related to 
you the other evening this integrating pro- 
cess had finally reached the stage where 
it moved me to experimental verification. The 
success of my experiment with the reaper, tri- 
vial as it may seem to men like the Professor, 
who have only memories of a brilliant child- 
hood spent in school under competent teachers 
to fall back on, meant more to me than they 
can ever understand. It was the first tangible 
proof I had that I was not totally devoid of 
mental power and it filled 1 my imagination with 
dreams of future conquests that were destined 
to tease me for years to come and that my so- 



218 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

called judgment condemned as the vain fancies 
of a fool and set aside lest their expression 
should bring upon me well merited ridicule." 



CHAPTER XXV 
A Successful Invention. 

"Day-dreams such as that of the reaper, fol- 
lowed by experimental verification, were, how- 
ever, only the prelude or the blossoms, the fruit 
came later in that same summer in the inven- 
tion and the building of a grubbing machine 
that worked. 

"On the bank of a beautiful little inland lake 
that skirted the southern extremity of my fa- 
ther's farm, there once stood a majestic grove 
of black oaks that for more than a century had 
sheltered the wigwam of the Sioux. In the 
early fifties the finest of these trees fell be- 
fore the axe of the pioneer, who converted 
their straight trunks into logs with which to 
build his hut or split them into rails with which 
to enclose the first few acres he had hewn from 
the primeval forest. But the life of these trees 
was beyond the reach of his axe in the wide- 
spreading roots where it lay safely hidden from: 



220 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

the frosts of winter. At the first call of spring 
the tide of sap rose to the surface and not 
finding its accustomed channels, built for itself 
around each stump a clump of suckers whose 
dense foliage during several subsequent sea- 
sons afforded a secure nesting-place for the 
brown thrush. 

"At the time of which I speak, a quarter of 
a century had transformed these suckers into 
clusters of vigorous young oaks whose trunks 
had grown together at the base and whose 
roots were intertwined in an inextricable mass. 

"Under a scorching July sun, with scarcely 
a breath of air stirring, and with a crew of half 
a dozen workmen to help me, I was engaged 
in clearing this field for the plow. The roots 
of the dense underbrush of hazel and sumac 
that had been cut during the previous winter 
formed a close felt-work in the loose soil 
that prevented the use of the spade and made 
difficult the work of laying bare the roots of the 
trees for the axe. When the outer circle of 
roots had been removed, the task of reaching 
the small roots under the center of the cluster 



A Successful Invention 221 

became tedious and exasperating and even 
when the last of these roots had been cut, the 
base was so large that the cluster retained its 
erect position. 

"Under similar circumstances on a former 
occasion I had seen Bernard make use of a 
team of horses and a block and tackle to bend 
the clusters to one side and thus facilitate the 
cutting of the few central roots. I was tempted 
to resort to this expedient, whereupon I remem- 
bered my day-dream about the relation of 
power to motion and my experiment with the 
reaper. This led me to the conclusion that a 
combination of the pulley and the wheel and 
axle would yield better results. 

"The more I thought over the matter and 
the more exasperated I became at the slowness 
of our progress, the more firmly did this idea 
take possession of me. A heavy rain kept me 
indoors next day. As soon as I finished my 
chores I went to the shed and began to dig 
out discarded farm machinery, in search of the 
wheels and shafts which I needed for the con- 
struction of the machine that I had planned 



222 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

while on the grubbing field the previous day. 

"I worked feverishly all day, during the 
course of which I was more than once ques- 
tioned by the workmen and by the members of 
the family as to what I was doing. I had only 
one answer for all such questions, 'Nothing, 
just fooling. ' My previous failures had taught 
me prudence. Realizing the possibility of an- 
other failure and shrinking from the ridicule 
which it would be sure to bring upon me, I 
resolved to satisfy myself that the machine 
would be a success before telling any one of 
my plans or hopes. 

"Among the old machinery was the body of 
a mowing machine that had been built in Balti- 
more in 1859 and shipped to Mendota by way 
of the Chesapeake & Ohio canal and the Ohio 
and Mississippi Rivers. The sickle-bar had 
been lost in transit and had not been replaced 
and, consequently, the machine had never seen 
actual service. One of the first of its kind, 
it was heavy and clumsy in construction; its 
shafts and wheels had many times the strength 



A Successful Invention 223 

needed for mowing, but they just suited my 
purpose. 

"I struggled for some time in the vain en- 
deavor to remove one of these wheels, but it 
had rusted to its shaft and defied my best ef- 
forts. When I realized that I could not dis- 
lodge the wheel with the tools at my disposal, 
it dawned upon me, that, by slightly modifying 
my original plan, I could alter the mowing ma- 
chine so as to make it serve my purpose. 

"Before I went to bed that night I had my 
grubbing machine well under way and by work- 
ing after supper into the late hours of the 
night I had it ready for trial inside of a week ; 
but the test could not be made while others, 
who would discover the purpose of the ma- 
chine and be witnesses to a possible failure, 
stood around. The following Sunday morn- 
ing I remained at home to 'mind the house' 
while the rest of the family went to early 
Mass. 

"The machine was mounted on two wheels, 
and as soon as I was left alone I ran it out of 
its place in the shed and anchored it to one of 



22j. _ he Makiug sue the Jummmeg ::" i _ -ihir: 

me irees it me yari. With i piece :: rtev; ht'.f- 
i.zm rite I ::r.r.er.ei the mum vnth t zemh- 
bcrete tree mm mmr. tummr the mart!-:. The 
ripe rr-iuih;- umttecte:: m: ammst "zemre I 

felt the pressure m the hmume it sumpe::. 
"A tme :•: :p sumret : er me sum is :r..y 

is: : . riv/emertt will ever urmersmrm I ham 
brains! 1 -is an mver.tm The lesire for 
cmteahmer.t vras n:~ : mpe: mt: a feverish 

immanence t: emznit me mc.ti.tc t: m.e tam- 
ilv etc the tmte unci, thev remtte: trim 



CHAPTER XXVI 
A Family IVetblanket 

"A detailed description of this rather primi- 
tive grubbing machine would hardly prove in- 
teresting. As it stood in the yard that Sun- 
day morning, while I waited impatiently for 
the family's return, it was simply a combina- 
tion of wheel and axle in which the proportion 
of power to weight was as i to 2,400. For- 
tunately for me. the body of the machine was 
very strongly built. The shaft turned in brass 
boxes and the wheels were held in mesh by a 
heavy iron frame-work. The workmanship 
on the construction of the mower was so good 
that there was comparatively little friction in 
the running gear. 

"In this instance, unlike that of the reaper, 
my knowledge of the relation of power to 
weight was not a mere approximation depend- 
ing upon sense memory. I had .made actual 
count of the number of revolutions of the crank 



226 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

required to cause the main axle to revolve once, 
and this axle, or drum, for as such I used it, 
was two inches in diameter, whereas the diame- 
ter of the circle traversed by the crank was 
thirty-six inches. I was well aware, therefore, 
that every pound of power applied to the han- 
dle was transformed into something more than 
a ton by the time it reached the rope. I knew 
that the 2,400 pounds would be reduced some- 
what by friction, but the extent of this reduc- 
tion was utterly beyond my power to calcu- 
late. 

"I believed that as soon as I could convince 
my brother of the value of the machine I could 
get such improvements for it as I desired. I 
had counted on using four pulley blocks, which 
I knew would change the relation of power to 
weight from 1 to 2,400 to 1 to 384,000. This 
would, of course, be somewhat diminished by 
friction. Moreover, I could at this time lift 
five hundred pounds and I calculated that I 
could easily enough apply at least half of this 
to the crank, the handle of which I had made 
long enough and strong enough to allow two 



A Family Wetblanket 227 

men to exert their combined strength in turn- 
ing. 

"It is a simple matter to multiply 384,000 by 
500 and thus reach the conclusion that two 
men could exert a pressure of 192,000,000 
pounds on the tree which it was desired to pull 
out by the roots. But the multiplication table 
was still an impenetrable mystery to me and I 
simply knew that two men on the crank would 
be able to exert a tremendous pressure on the 
clusters of young trees that had been annoying 
and baffling me during the previous week. 

"My imagination was on fire with all this 
and with the wonderful things that the grub- 
bing machine would surely accomplish. I 
thought of the forests that were still to be 
grubbed and feared that they were not exten- 
sive enough, and of the patents that were to be 
taken out, and of the money that was to be 
made, and I am afraid that before the hour had 
drawn to a close I was a millionaire in imagi- 
nation. In the midst of it all, the thought 
kept continually obtruding itself that whatever 
my shortcomings in other respects, and prob- 



228 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

ably I judged myself at this time more severely 
than others did, there was at least one thing 
for which I had brains, and a glorious career as 
a machinist and an inventor seemed to stretch 
out before me. 

"At last the family arrived. The carriage 
stopped just in front of my machine. I was 
standing with my hand on the crank, with my 
heart ready to burst with joy, not to mention 
the condition of my head, but to my surprise 
and disappointment not one member of the 
family would bestow even a single glance on 
me or on my machine. As Joe threw the lines 
over the dashboard and stepped from the car- 
riage I tried to tell him about my wonderful 
invention, but I was chilled by the reception 
which the others gave me, and the unsympa- 
thetic look on his face caused the words to 
stick in my throat, as he turned towards the 
house with the peremptory order, 'Ed, put up 
the team right away.' " 



CHAPTER XXVII 
The First Triumph 

"The next morning I hitched the grubbing 
machine behind the wagon, intending to take 
it with me to the grubbing field, which was at 
the other end of the farm, but Joe appeared 
on the scene and forbade the procedure. I re- 
member his words still ; they hurt and angered 
me more than anything he had ever said to me. 
'Unhitch that thing and leave it here, and quit 
wasting the men's time with your fool ma- 
chines.' In my experience, no one had ever 
questioned Joe's authority; his word was law 
on the farm. So, with a heavy heart and a re- 
bellious will, I unhitched my grubbing ma- 
chine and went back to dig out the clusters of 
young oaks without its aid. 

"At noon, however, I found that Joe had 
gone to town, so I again hitched the machine 
behind the wagon. Whatever the consequences 



230 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

might be, I was determined to see the thing 
through and to give my machine a fair trial. 

"My father was going to Bernard's house 
and he rode with me as far as the grubbing 
field. He scolded me all the way for my dis- 
obedience to Joe, but he did not himself forbid 
me to take the machine to the field. When we 
reached the grove I wanted him to wait to see 
the machine work, but this he positively refused 
to do. 

"I at once proceeded to anchor the grubbing^ 
machine to a stump and to attach the pulley to 
a cluster of oaks that I had partially grubbed 
out in the forenoon. To my great joy, it came 
out without difficulty, and all my dreams re- 
turned to me in spite of the family wetblanket. 
In pulling the second cluster, however, I broke 
the chain; my chief difficulty now was to get 
anything strong enough to hold me. I had 
brought along all the chains I could find about 
the place. After my experiment the day be- 
fore, I knew that a half-inch rope was practi- 
cally worthless and there was no stronger rope 
available. The log-chains were clumsy and not 



The First Triumph 231 

what I wanted, but, under the circumstances, 
they were the best I could get. In the follow- 
ing two hours I think I must have broken the 
chain half a dozen times. I had learned to 
measure neither my power nor the strength of 
the chains. 

"About four o'clock in the afternoon my 
brother's hired boy happened along, apparently 
by chance, but he told me, sub rosa, that my 
father had sent him down to see whether the 
machine was working or not, and had cau- 
tioned him not to tell me that he was sent. We 
had results to show him that made his eyes 
bulge. He told me that there was a coil of 
new inch-rope in Bernard's barn, which my 
brother intended to use in digging a well, and 
he volunteered to bring it to me. Half an 
hour later he returned with the rope, and with 
him was my father, who watched the opera- 
tion of the grubbing machine with unfeigned 
delight. 

"When we reached home that evening, Joe 
was eating his dinner. He had just learned 
of my disobedience, and, for the first time in 



232 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

my memory, he seemed genuinely angry. And 
notwithstanding the fact that there were 
strangers in the dining room when I entered, 
he turned sharply on me and reprimanded me 
for disobeying orders. 

"But father stopped him saying, 'Never mind, 
Joe, Ed did more work this afternoon with his 
grubbing machine than the crew could do in a 
week without it. You had better hitch up in 
the morning and go to town and get him every- 
thing he wants for it.' " 



CHAPTER XXVIII 
The Parting of the Ways 

"Did you make anything on your patent, 
Doctor, or did you let some one cheat you out 
of it as is usual in such cases?" asked Mr. 
Eaton. 

"No, I never took out a patent on the grub- 
bing machine. If I had had the money at the 
time I would undoubtedly have applied for 
a patent. But Joe, who held the key to the 
family exchequer, did not see the thing in that 
light. His good judgment in this matter prob- 
ably saved me from a mistake which would 
have changed the whole current of my life. 
He was well informed on such matters and 
knew that only a small percentage of the in- 
ventions that are patented ever pay the expense 
involved. 

"The grubbing machine did good service 
during the following two or three years in 
clearing my father's farm. But apart from the 



234 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

saving of time and labor involved in this it 
never brought me a cent. Its value, as I look 
at it now, was not to be measured by the dol- 
lar standard, nor did the machine contain any 
important addition to the science of mechanics. 
Its value was almost wholly personal and chiefly 
subjective. 

"The construction and the successful opera- 
tion of this machine, however, had many far- 
reaching effects on the development of my mind 
and character. Some of the incidents connected 
with this are worthy of more than a passing 
glance from those who are interested in the 
problems of mental development. 

"My revolt against my brother's authority, 
for instance, trivial as it must have seemed to 
my family, or to the casual onlooker, was in 
reality the turning point in the formation of 
my character. The child naturally obeys the 
individual. But when he becomes a man he 
must put away the things of a child. He be- 
gins to be a man in that hour wherein he 
learns to transfer his allegiance from individu- 
als to principles and when that hour comes he 



The Parting of the Ways 235 

must make the transition or a second oppor- 
tunity will, in all human probability, never be 
offered and he will remain during the rest 
of his natural life a mere tool or chattel in 
the hands of others. 

"Strength and stubbornness, on account of 
their superficial resemblances, are often con- 
founded, and yet they are in reality separated 
from each other by polar distances. Strength 
of character is measured by its unswerving 
loyalty to truth and to the principles of justice 
as these are revealed in the individual con- 
sciousness. Stubbornness, on the contrary, fol- 
lows neither truth nor principle nor justice; it 
is animated solely by egotism and vanity. The 
persistence which the stubborn manifest in 
pursuing a course of action that they have once 
entered upon is not relieved by insight or 
imagination; it is not guided by reason or prin- 
ciple; it partakes of the nature of that blind 
momentum that is found in masses of moving 
matter. 

"It is needless to say that I did not indulge 
in any character analysis at the time. In this 



236 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

I was not unlike other boys who come to the 
parting of the ways that lead either to free- 
dom or to slavery. The decision must be made, 
in large measure, on the basis of instinct and of 
trivial circumstances, and without the aid of 
that larger discourse of reason that enables 
the mature mind to look before and after. I 
had no realization of the consequences. It did 
not occur to me in my revolt against my 
brother's authority that I had come to the 
parting of the ways and had already taken the 
most important step that I would ever be called 
upon to take. But the effect of this revolt on 
my consciousness was none the less permanent 
and far-reaching on that account. In fact, the 
law underlying the transition from obedience 
to individuals to obedience to principles was 
implanted in my consciousness on this occasion 
under conditions such as gave to it an imme- 
diate and vigorous development. 

"The thought of the grubbing machine had 
been born of my necessity under the broiling 
July sun and of my day-dreams during several 
preceding years, and when I tested the machine 



The Parting of the Ways 23J 

on that Sunday morning, and when the rope 
snapped at the touch of my hand, theory 
glowed to incandescence and burned the truth 
in question into the depths of my conscious- 
ness. 

"There was left in my mind no shadow of 
doubt that the machine would do the thing that 
was needed to be done on the grubbing field, 
and consequently there was no doubt in my 
mind that it meant the saving of time and 
money to the family as well as triumph to me. 
These convictions were formed and crystallized 
in a mind that was glowing with emotions of 
many kinds. Triumph had at last succeeded 
repeated failures; self-reliance had taken the 
place of vacillating uncertainty; the conscious- 
ness of mental power replaced the abiding con- 
viction of my own stupidity. 

"The indifference of my family, disappoint- 
ing as it was, and the contempt for me involved 
in my brother's order, however they may have 
chilled me, were powerless to efface the convic- 
tion that had grown up in my consciousness. 
Besides, it was I who was doing the grubbing 



.238 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

and not my brother, and in his order I saw 
only harshness and injustice for he condemned 
the machine without taking the trouble to 
look into its merits. 

"Of course I can now see the reasonableness 
of my brother's course of action. There was so 
little to be hoped for from the omadhaun, and 
there was such a small chance of his invent- 
ing and building a machine that would work, 
that common sense would prevent one from 
looking into it. I have, myself, taken a simi- 
lar attitude many times since under like cir- 
cumstances. But on that morning I could see 
only my side of the question. My brother's 
action in the matter appeared to me as the ac- 
tion of a tyrant, and it stung me to my first 
act of open rebellion against his authority. 

"After all, success measures the distance be- 
tween treason and patriotism. Be sure that 
you are right and then go ahead is good ad- 
vice. Retreat is difficult and dangerous at 
best ; in most cases it is fatal. Nerve currents 
never double back on themselves. All nerve 
currents emerge ultimately on the motor side 



The Parting of the Ways 239 

of life. 'He that putteth his hand to the plow 
and looketh back is not worthy of me.' 

"I remember that I was very deeply im- 
pressed some years after the time of which I 
speak by a description of a thrilling scene at 
the Natural Bridge in Virginia which I found 
in one of the school Readers. The ambitious 
boy, in his desire to inscribe his name higher 
than that of any other that adorned or disfig- 
ured the sandstone cliff, dug a niche for his 
foot and another for his left hand and thus 
lifted himself a foot or two at a time until he 
had carved his name above all the others on 
the mighty wall. But not satisfied with this 
he cut and carved again and again until he had 
attained a height from which there was no 
possible return; his only safety lay in reach- 
ing the top. With bated breath and agonized 
prayer his friends below watched his slow 
progress upward as with despairing energy he 
cut niche after niche in the flinty limestone 
until his knife, worn to the haft, dropped from 
his nerveless hand. But he had cut his way out 
from under the overhanging arch to a point 



240 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

where he could be seen by those watching from 
the bridge above, and as one tired foot slipped 
from its niche a rope was dropped over his 
shoulders and he was drawn up to safety. 

"This, after all, is a true picture of life. 
'Nothing succeeds like success/ The child is 
governed by the immediacy of the pleasure-pain 
reaction. This is true also of the animal; but 
man must rise superior to this and the vision 
of ultimate good must give him strength and 
endurance to bear present pain and to over- 
come all obstacles in its achievement or die in 
the attempt. And it is important that this 
lesson be learned once for all on the very day 
on which the boy, by transferring his allegiance 
from men to principles, ceases to be a boy and 
becomes a man. 

"Had my grubbing machine failed me on 
that day, my brother's rebuke in the evening 
would have crushed me utterly; and in all hu- 
man probability I should never again have 
followed my conviction when it led me beyond 
the narrow pathway of the letter of the law. 
The very glow of emotion and all the pent-up 



The Parting of the Ways 241 

feelings that went into that revolt against my 
brother's authority and into the trial of the 
machine would have burned failure into my 
consciousness so as to determine the course of 
subsequent events as certainly as the success of 
the enterprise actually determined their course 
in the opposition direction/' 



CHAPTER XXIX 

Illusions 

"I now know that the success of the grub- 
bing machine was a pure accident. Had I 
carried out my original plan, it would have 
failed utterly, and this for the same reason 
that the grindstone experiments failed. I had 
planned on using for the grubbing machine a 
wooden frame on which I intended to bolt 
boxes. Had I carried out this intention the 
wheels would have pushed away from each 
other as soon as the strain came upon them. Of 
course a wooden frame could have been so 
constructed as to hold a double-back-gearing in 
proper alignment, even under very heavy pres- 
sure, but at that time I was wholly innocent of 
the principles of mechanical construction in- 
volved in such machines. 

"So I really owed the success of my grub- 
bing machine to the fact that I was unable to 
dislodge a few rusty wheels from their shafts, 



Illusions 243 

and was in consequence led to accept as the 
basis of my machine an iron framework that, 
although built for entirely different purposes, 
had sufficient strength to support the strain 
that was put upon it in the grubbing machine. 
I did not, however, advert to this circumstance 
at the time and took to myself the full credit 
for the successful working of the machine." 

"Doctor, didn't this invention of yours make 
your mother very proud and happy," asked 
Mrs. O'Brien. 

"Yes, I suppose it did for the moment, but 
at this late date I have no way of ascertaining 
just what effect the incident had on the vari- 
ous members of my family. Of course, after 
father's announcement of the success of the 
machine I was asked to explain its working and 
to state what further improvements I needed. 
But I hardly think you can form an estimate 
of how impossible it was for me to put my 
thoughts into words. At that time it was far 
easier for me to handle an axe or a grub hoe 
than to use my mother-tongue. For years I 
had remained silent, speaking only when it was 



244 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

absolutely necessary; and what little power of 
speech I was possessed of under ordinary cir- 
cumstances deserted me now in my excite- 
ment. 

"I have sometimes wondered why the pea- 
cock struts and exhibits his gorgeous plumage. 
What benefit does he derive from the practice 
apart from the exercise involved? And yet 
his strutting is an instinct that has been formed 
under the pressure of untold ages in the strug- 
gle for existence and it must be possessed of 
some real value to the race. Is it a similar law, 
I wonder, that makes each one of us strut at 
some time or other in our lives ? 

"I do not believe that I had an opportunity, 
perhaps I did not even have the desire, to strut 
when I was a child and now when I was six- 
teen years old all the pent-up struts that my in- 
fancy should have known suddenly rose up 
within me and in their frantic efforts to ex- 
hibit themselves simultaneously left me para- 
lyzed and devoid of speech. 

"I had grown morbidly self-conscious during 
the years of my discouragement, and now in 



Illusions 245 

the moment of exaltation I became still more 
self-conscious. To me the grubbing machine 
seemed to fill the whole heavens. I could not 
understand how any one who knew of it could 
think of anything else. It was so full of in- 
definite possibilities that I feared some one 
who saw it working would anticipate me at the 
Patent Office and rob me of the just fruits of 
my discovery. 

"It was but natural that I should interpret 
the impression made upon the members of my 
family and upon others who saw the machine 
work by my own wildly exaggerated notions 
of its importance. As I look back at the oc- 
currence, I realize, of course, that the impres- 
sion actually made upon those around me was 
not at all in keeping with what I then supposed 
it to be. 

"That my family were surprised and pleased 
at the originality and initiative displayed by the 
omadhaun there can be no doubt, but for all 
that, my grubbing machine could not have 
gone far towards changing their estimate of 
me. As far as I know it did not even awaken 



246 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

in them the buried hope of giving me an ele- 
mentary knowledge of the three R's. 

"This state of affairs must not be thought 
strange. The invention objectively considered 
was trivial to a degree, and it could hardly 
be expected that any of those around me would 
understand its subjective value. And, after 
all, are not the subjective values the real val- 
ues? It would be hard to overestimate the 
value of this poor grubbing machine to my 
mental life, and it is just as well to remember 
that this value was due almost wholly to the 
fictitious importance which I attached to it. I 
can never be sufficiently grateful to Providence 
that in those days there were none of those 
well-meaning fools at hand to enlighten me 
concerning the real value of my invention. Had 
I been able to see the naked truth it would 
have shattered my bubble of conceit and left 
me in the slough of despond. 

"Mud pies, houses of cards, doll houses, pop- 
guns, and kites are to us grown-ups trivial 
matters, but they are often filled with tragic 
importance to the child. Perhaps, some day, 



Illusions 247 

when we view all things in the unchanging 
light of eternity, our adult hopes and large am- 
bitions, our latest discoveries, our railroads, 
canals, and games of empire will seem as trivial 
in their objective importance as do those games 
of childhood and we shall come to understand 
that the only real importance of achievement 
is the subjective importance. 

"My family had the good sense not to un- 
dertake to disillusionize me. They had a word 
of praise for the machine whenever it was 
mentioned and they exercised a quiet but firm 
restraint whenever I spoke of taking out a pat- 
ent. It is true, however, that I did not trouble 
them much with my dreams and ambitions. I 
was not communicative and I seldom ventured 
to speak of these matters to any one. This 
silence was a blessing for it saved me from the 
ridicule that would undoubtedly have been be- 
stowed upon me had the content of my mind 
been expressed in words. 

"One of the best fruits of my silence, per- 
haps, was the fact that my illusion was allowed 
to run its natural course. I hardly dare say 



248 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

it, but it has seemed to me many times that 
illusions are our salvation. I feel sure that it 
was so in my case at least. The truth would 
have left me paralyzed and in a slough of de- 
spond to the end of my days. It was the bright, 
flashing illusion, a mere rainbow of ambition, 
that led me up out of the valley of darkness 
and discouragement. 

"Of course the illusion could not have lasted 
long under any circumstance; it is notorious 
that we can not long continue to believe in 
visions of this sort without tangible assets, 
but in my case the disillusionment came grad- 
ually, and each stage of it was produced by 
some achievement or by the attainment of some 
truth that was of permanent value to me, so 
that by the time I had grown out of my illu- 
sion concerning the importance of the grub- 
bing machine I had learned to form a juster es- 
timate of my own powers and the germ of hope 
had begun to set its roots deep in my nature/ ' 



CHAPTER XXX 
Transitory Phases 

"Doctor," said Miss Russell, "your para- 
doxes last Friday evening proved too much 
for me. I did not object at the time because I 
felt sure that you could not have meant what 
you seemed to say, but the more I have thought 
about the matter the more puzzled I have be- 
come. Did I understand you to say that error 
and illusion saved you where the truth would 
have left you crushed and paralyzed ? Do you 
mean that error and illusion are ever good? 
that they are ever better than the truth for a 
sane mind? 

"Our work in school is made up largely of 
efforts to eradicate error and dispel illusions 
from the minds of the children. You surely do 
not disagree with this policy? You would not 
have the children grow up in error and illu- 
sion ?" 

"My dear Miss Russell, you are not the first 



250 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

one who has found it difficult to unravel that 
riddle. But it is well to remember at the out- 
set that the God of truth ordained that we 
should give milk to babes and meat to men, 
and that even at the last He said to His apos- 
tles, T have many things to say to you, but you 
cannot bear them now.' What do you think 
He meant by the parable in which the servants 
come to the master rilled with indignation on 
having found cockle growing up with the 
wheat, and anxious for permission to pull it 
up; but the Master said, 'Let it be until the 
harvest, lest in pulling up the cockle you should 
pull up the wheat with it.' 

"There is no real disagreement between us. 
Truth is life and freedom to the mind; the 
only question is how we shall attain it. Have 
you not heard the old story of the two men 
who built a shanty, and having nailed on the 
last board from the inside, one said, 'Let us 
cut a hole to let the dark out,' and the other 
replied, 'No, but let us cut a hole to let the 
light in.' 

"The salvation of the child must ultimately 



Transitory Phases 251 

come from the truth; but the question is, how 
shall he attain the truth? It's a graceless task 
to go about plucking error and illusion from 
the child's mind. The human mind grows in 
knowledge under the law of development 
wherein it is written that each subsequent phase 
shall be attained through the reconstruction of 
the previous phase. In the human mind you 
cannot build with the naked truth; the mind 
cannot look upon it and live. The child needs 
his fairy stories and Santa Claus and his child- 
ish settings for all manner of truths. 

"The crayfish can grow only by casting off 
its shell from time to time, but if, in your mis- 
taken zeal to help it in its growth, you pro- 
ceed to tear off the shell, you will kill it instead 
of helping it. 

"Error and illusion, after all, are but the 
natural limitations of the mind's growth; 
they drop away as naturally and as inevitably 
before the light of growing truth as do the 
shadows before the rising sun. 

"It is quite true that, looked at in one way, 
the teacher's duty may be said to consist, in 



252 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

large measure, in the correcting of the pupils' 
mistakes and in the dispelling of their illu- 
sions, but it does not follow, on this account, 
that the teacher is to play iconoclast and spend 
his time in endeavoring to make young children 
see the truth through adult eyes. The teacher 
should correct the children's errors by putting 
something better in their place in the minds of 
the children, something truer, something more 
beautiful. This will help to lift them into a 
larger and purer mental life. 

"If I had time to go into details in my own 
story, I might easily point out to you the 
working of this principle. If on the evening 
of my first success with the grubbing ma- 
chine, some one had made me realize its paltri- 
ness and shown me what little significance it 
had for the world at large, I would have been 
crushed and would have had nothing to fall 
back on. But as it happened, I was allowed 
to dream dreams that night of my wonderful 
achievement, and the next day my brother took 
me to town with him to purchase the needed 
improvements, having found it impossible to 



Transitory Phases. 253 

obtain from me a sufficiently accurate descrip- 
tion of what I needed. 

"We visited the largest foundry and machine 
shop in the city, and there, with wonder and 
delight, I saw for the first time lathes, and 
drills, and planing machines, operating with 
quiet, irresistible strength, and with what 
seemed to me to be almost human intelligence. 

"When I returned home that night my grub- 
bing machine had, somehow, shrunk many 
sizes ; nevertheless, there was no grubbing ma- 
chine in the machine shop and I, Studevan's 
omadhaun, was the inventor of one, and even if 
it were not such a great thing, it was some- 
thing. I conceived a burning desire to be a 
machinist. I felt that if, without ever having 
seen a machine shop, and without the aid of 
any of its superb appliances, I had been able 
to make the grubbing machine, I would surely 
b'e able to do great things after I should have 
learned my trade. 

"The following winter I begged my father 
again and again to obtain for me a place where 
I could serve my apprenticeship as a machinist ; 



254 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

when he refused I determined to run away 
from home and learn the trade on my 
own account. I actually visited every machine 
shop in the Twin Cities and offered my serv- 
ices to the foreman free if he would just take 
me in and let me learn the trade. But after 
one look I was rejected at each and every shop. 
It was rather hard, to be sure, on a budding 
inventor, but I had been pretty well sobered 
down by this time. I had come to realize that 
the rest of the world had concerns of their 
own, and that for some strange reason they 
were more interested in other things than in 
grubbing machines or their inventors." 



CHAPTER XXXI 

Self -Reliance 

"Doctor, I am sure that you will make it all 
clear to us in the end, but at present your ac- 
count of the grubbing machine incident leaves 
me more at sea than ever," said Miss Ruth. 
"Wasn't it a mean trick that Fate played you 
in first lifting you up to the seventh heaven 
of triumph and then slowly submerging you in 
what must have been a very deep discourage- 
ment? Your rejection by those stupid fore- 
men must have left you utterly wilted and in a 
condition that, on the face of it, seems to be 
much worse than that in which you were be- 
fore you began work on the machine. I fail 
to see how the whole experience could have 
been anything to you but a calamity no matter 
how it terminated. If any of those foremen 
had had sense enough to accept you and to give 
you an opportunity to learn the machinist trade 



256 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

in his shop, doesn't it seem probable that you 
never would have returned to school? On the 
other hand, whatever actual development re- 
sulted from your partial success and the dis- 
couragement at its close must have re- 
moved you further than ever from books and 
school." 

"Appearances are as you say, Miss Ruth, 
but this is largely due to the fact that I have 
not yet stated fully all the circumstances of the 
case. In the first place, let me say that the 
shrinkage in my idea of the importance of the 
grubbing machine and my failure to obtain a 
position as a machinist's apprentice did not dis- 
courage me as much as might be supposed. 

"In spite of all the disappointments and 
humiliations that befell me during that Fall 
and Winter, there remained with me an abid- 
ing conviction which nothing could shake that 
the grubbing machine was a real success; the 
magnitude of the success was quite another 
matter. 

"During that summer the machine had en- 
abled me to pull out hundreds of trees by the 



Self-Reliance 257 

roots with my own hands. Again and again 
I had snapped a two-inch cable with the mul- 
tiplied power of my own muscles. Every 
time a great oak tree bent over under the 
strain put upon it, and every time that root 
after root snapped a hundred feet from me and 
shook the earth beneath my feet, I felt myself 
to be the source of a mighty power; and the 
energy that went out from my arm over cable 
and chain returned in a tide of strength to my 
will and built there the foundations of self- 
reliance. 

"Even when those foremen, one after an- 
other, refused my application, I attributed the 
refusal to my uncouth exterior, and went away 
with the comfortable conviction that there was 
something in me much better than anything 
that had hitherto appeared on the surface. I 
knew that if I could only make any one of 
those foremen realize my real worth, he would 
gladly welcome me to his shop. 

"In this was I so different from the rest of 
men ? If we were all entirely candid, would not 
most of us confess to a lurking conviction that 



258 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

there are a few nuggets of real worth in us 
that have not yet appeared on the surface ? 

"It was well for me that my exaggerated no- 
tions about my invention should in time be re- 
duced to something like proper proportions. 
I think it is well for all of us to be freed from 
too great inflation in matters of this kind, but 
we must not forget the other necessity, i. e., that 
this reduction take place gradually so that it 
may leave with us all that may be of real 
value. 

"Sudden disillusionment usually destroys 
our legitimate faith in ourselves; it is like the 
pulling up of the wheat with the cockle, against 
which the Master so pointedly warns His dis- 
ciples. It was fortunate for me that my sense 
of the importance of the grubbing machine 
dwindled down to proper proportions very 
slowly and that while this was taking place, I 
succeeded with several other more or less tri- 
vial devices, which, joined to the kernel of real 
value that was in the invention of the grubbing 
machine, gave me a basis of hope which, how- 
ever modest, was very real. 



Self -Reliance 259 

"Speculating on what might have happened 
if this or the other circumstance in one's life 
were different is hardly a profitable employ- 
ment; but it does seem as if it would have 
been a real calamity to me had I at that time 
found a shop in which to serve my appren- 
ticeship to the machinist trade. Had that hap- 
pened, it is probable that I would today be a 
mechanic, probably a good mechanic, if that 
term may be applied to an illiterate man ; but it 
is probable that had I then learned the machin- 
ist's trade I should never have gone back to 
school. 

"As things actually fell out, it would seem at 
first sight as if the training of my senses and 
of my muscles, the development of the number 
concept and of the sense of geometrical rela- 
tions, the combination of these factors in my 
day-dreams and their concrete expression in the 
invention of the grubbing machine and of 
other simple mechanical appliances would 
have led me further than ever from books and 
school. 



260 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

"And yet, as I look back over the events of 
those years, I can not escape the conviction that 
my education would never have come to me, 
that I would never have had even a desire 
for it, were it not for my development along 
those lines that on the face of things seem so 
far removed from what usually passes for edu- 
cation. 

"An experience of twenty years with dull- 
ards has convinced me that we are here in the 
presence of a natural law. The dullard's one 
hope of salvation is bound up with the phase 
of his mental development that is directly re- 
lated to concrete reality. 

"The sensory-motor reaction lies at the basis 
of mental life and until this is developed and 
made the standard of interpretation, the knowl- 
edge contained in books and language remains 
sealed. But once we have secured a vigorous 
development along these lines, it will be found 
comparatively easy to divert the flow of men- 
tal energy into other channels. 

"In this way, it will not be difficult to bring 
about gradually a symmetrical or balanced de- 



Self-Reliance 261 

velopment, which should be the aim of all true 
education. On the other hand, there is no surer 
way to defeat all the purposes of education 
than to cram book learning into a boy's mind 
before he has any desire or capacity for such 
knowledge and while all his being is crying out 
for the elemental things involved in sensory- 
motor experience. 

"The development resulting from concrete 
experience with nature, is much more inti- 
mately connected with that development which 
exhibits itself in letters than appears on the 
surface. It is not improbable that the world 
is indebted for the genius of Shakespeare to 
the fact that he escaped too much formal drill 
in school and to the further fact that many of 
the happiest hours of the boy's life were spent 
in the woods listening to the song of birds and 
to the murmur of the breezes in the treetops, 
with his senses bathed in the perfume of wild 
flowers, while he chased the squirrel to its 
nest, or watched the wounded fowl creep in 
among the sedges. 

"Had he been forced to spend those hours, 



262 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard" 

as too many of the children of his generation 
and of subsequent generations have been forced 
to do, seated on a hard bench, his feet dang- 
ling, trying to engrave on the tablets of his 
memory the a, b, c's, while his soul was in 
angry revolt, his heart never could have been 
the source of the sweet songs that have 
charmed the world." 



CHAPTER XXXII 
Learning to Read 

"I have already given you an account of my 
first abortive attempts to read. When I first 
went to school I could read fairly well for a 
boy of six; that is, I could read the simple 
phrases of Wilson's First Reader. I was im- 
mediately promoted to Wilson's Second Read- 
er, where, as far as I now remember, I also 
succeeded fairly well. But early in my eighth 
year, probably because the teacher did not want 
to have me in a class by myself, she made the 
mistake of putting me into the class with chil- 
dren older than myself, who were reading in 
the National Third Reader. 

"Nothing was done by the teacher to brings 
to us a realization of the content of the litera- 
ture that we tried to read. The selections in- 
the Third Reader were all classical and were 



264 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

chosen without any apparent regard to the lim- 
itations of a child's vocabulary. There was 
consequently little chance that the children 
would understand what they were reading. 

"To be sure, we were required to memorize 
some of the words with their definitions; but 
all this was a meaningless memory drill for 
most of us, and, as far as I was concerned, it 
was entirely beyond me. Many of the words 
I could not even pronounce, and whenever I 
was called upon to read, I stumbled hopelessly, 
felt humiliated before the whole school, was 
laughed at by the children, and scolded by the 
teacher. I ended up with the conviction that 
I 'had no talent' for reading. 

"I have since encountered a great many 
^children of all school ages who had made simi- 
lar discoveries with regard to the limitations of 
their talents. In every case that I have had 
an opportunity to investigate I found the cause 
to be the same : an unwise anticipation of some 
phase of the child's mental development. 

"I have already said that before I was nine 
years old I knew my catechism by heart from 



Learning to Read 265 

cover to cover, and it will be admitted that the 
catechism holds its own, even with the Na- 
tional Readers, in its total disregard of the 
child's capacity to understand. There are few 
readers of any series that can produce such a 
splendid array of long, and to the child, un- 
pronounceable words as are to be found in the 
catechism. I learned the catechism through my 
ear rather than through my eye, and for this 
reason it helped me but little with my reading. 
My sister 'heard my lesson' every evening. As 
a matter of fact, she pronounced it for me, 
word for word, and repeated it with me, over 
and over again, until I could say the lessons 
from beginning to end, questions and answers, 
without a hitch. 

"But transub'stantiation, indefectibility, in- 
fallibility, sovereignty, etc., had no more mean- 
ing for me than the transmagnificandandubo- 
banciality that was commonly used at that time 
for practice in syllabification. 

"It is not surprising, therefore, that when I 
was taken out of school at nine years of age I 
had lost all desire to read. I do not remem- 



266 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

ber to have opened a book or to have attempted 
to read a paragraph in a newspaper until my 
return to school at the age of thirteen. My 
attempts to learn to read during that brief in- 
terval of school life were not very successful, 
nor do I recall that there was any improve- 
ment in the method of teaching the art of read- 
ing. 

"There were between twenty and twenty-five 
children in my reading class. When the bell 
rang for the lesson, we lined up according to 
the places that we had held in the spelling 
exercise at the close of the preceding lesson. 
The pupil at the head of the class read the first 
paragraph of the two or three pages assigned 
for the day's lesson. Straightway, each one of 
us counted the paragraphs and calculated which 
one would fall to his turn. He neither knew 
nor cared what went before nor what came 
after his own paragraph. 

"That this was an unintelligent mode of pro- 
cedure I readily grant, but after all, it was 
only the logical outcome of the method of 
teaching the art of reading then in vogue. 



Learning to Read 267 

"During the three months of my stay at 
school I do not remember that the teacher ever 
offered a word of explanation or of comment 
on the subject-matter of the reading lesson. 
She taught us how long to pause for a comma, 
a semi-colon, a colon, and a period. She 
drilled us in the proper pronunciation of the 
words, and in the correct inflection before a 
period and before an interrogation point. But 
the personality of the author, the circumstances 
under which he wrote, the purposes he was 
striving to attain, or any of the information 
that would have helped us to a correct inter- 
pretation of what we were to read, did not seem 
to possess any interest or value for the teacher. 
The lesson consisted of two or three pages of 
an extract cut out of the body of some classic ; 
the reading book gave no synopsis of the text 
from which the lesson was taken, nor did it 
give any account of the circumstances which 
called it forth. There was no library within 
reach where we could have looked up the con- 
text and learned of the circumstances that had 
called forth the sentiments expressed in the les- 



268 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

son, even if by any strange chance one of us 
had conceived the idea of doing so. 

"It is quite possible that the teacher had no 
better library facilities in this respect than we 
had; so she should not be blamed too severely 
for not having furnished the class with infor- 
mation that, however necessary to the intelli- 
gent carrying out of the work on which we 
were engaged, was as far beyond her reach as 
it was beyond the reach of her pupils. 

"I was three or four years older and very 
much larger than the other members of the 
reading class and I have not the slightest doubt 
that I was the poorest reader among them. To 
make matters worse, during my four years' ab- 
sence from school I was removed from the com- 
panionship of children and had, in conse- 
quence, grown shy and awkward in my inter- 
course with them. The conditions were, there- 
fore, anything but favorable to my making a 
new and successful beginning in the difficult art 
of reading. 

"The experiment proved to be one long- 
drawn-out humiliation. Each day recorded a 



Learning to Read 269 

fresh failure and increased my discouragement 
proportionately. The teacher no longer 
scolded me, but her silence was quite as dis- 
concerting. The pupils did not laugh at me 
openly, but their pity was more galling than 
their laughter would have been. Do you won- 
der that during those three months my aver- 
sion to books was deepened, or that when I left 
school it was with a certain sense of satisfac- 
tion that I saw myself released forever from 
the hateful task of reading?" 



CHAPTER XXXIII 

A Widening Horizon 

"I have no recollection of making any at- 
tempt to read during the three years that fol- 
lowed. As we have seen, my mind was devel- 
oping along other lines during this time. I 
was not, however, totally devoid of imagina- 
tion, for I remember well that I listened with 
eager pleasure to the ghost stories and fairy 
tales that were occasionally told b'y the old 
folks as they sat around the fire of a winter's 
evening; and I was scarcely less interested in 
the stories of Indian warfare and of the wild 
west life in the mining camps that were 
swapped by the men as they worked beside me 
In the field or as they smoked their after-din- 
ner-pipes under the shade of the wide-spreading 
oak in our front yard. 

"My failure to seek in books food for my 
hungry imagination or companionship for my 



A Widening Horizon 271 

hours of loneliness was not due to lack of ex- 
ample. All the members of my family were 
fond of reading and devoted to this occupation 
the odd moments that could be spared from 
their duties, but they seldom read aloud. 

"I had no suspicion, therefore, that the kind 
of stories that interested me were to be found 
in books, nor would my attitude have been 
changed had I dipped into the volumes in our 
little family library. On the shelves in our one 
book-case were to b'e found only such ponder- 
ous and solemn works as Lippincott's Gazet- 
teer, the Bible, Milner's End of Controversy, 
The Knowledge and Love of Our Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ, Nathan's Church His- 
tory, Spalding's Miscellany and his History of 
the Reformation, Balmes's European Civiliza- 
tion, a treatise on surveying, The Lily of Is- 
rael, The Explanation of Miracles, Rodriguez 
Christian Perfection, etc. 

"It is true that such works did not furnish 
forth the customary reading matter for the 
family. A few volumes of lighter literature 
were purchased from time to time, but these 



272 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

books never found their way to the library 
shelves. After being read by all who were 
interested in them, they were passed on to our 
neighbors from whom other stories were bor- 
rowed in return. 

"Of course we took a secular weekly paper, 
our local Catholic paper, and the Ave Maria. 
The Fireside Companion and the New York 
Ledger somehow managed to find their way 
into our home in spite of the ban which my 
mother put upon such sensational stories as 
were to be found on their pages. Whenever 
these papers fell into her hands, she confiscated 
them and insisted on burning them, but not 
until she had first read all the stories which 
they contained, so as to make sure that her 
condemnation was entirely justifiable. 

"Had it been the habit of the family to read 
aloud, it is likely that some of these stories 
would have awakened my interest and brought 
home to me a realization that reading was 
something more than a disagreeable drill in 
which the clever might show to advantage. But 
every one in our home read for himself. An 



A Widening Horizon 273 

occasional news item was all that was ever 
read aloud. 

"During my sixteenth year this situation was 
changed by a set of circumstances that at first 
sight would seem to have no conceivable rela- 
tion to my mental development : A Total Ab- 
stinence Society had been organized in our 
parish a few years before the time of which I 
speak. Its funds, derived from monthly dues 
and fines, had been slowly accumulating until 
the treasury groaned under the weight of more 
than one hundred dollars. Whereupon it was 
determined to establish a circulating library 
from which each member would be privileged 
to withdraw one volume a week. 

"The books in this library were bought to 
be read. It contained the works of Carlton 
and of Charles Lever, the Waverly Novels and 
such stories as Thaddeus of Warsaw, Dion and 
the Sibyls, Fabiola, Callista, The Children of 
the Abbey, the Scottish Chiefs, etc. 

"Joe was the only one of us who belonged 
to the temperance society and he wanted to en- 
joy his privilege of taking out a fresh story 



274 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

each week. Now, since after supper was prac- 
tically the only time that could be spared 
from work, it was clearly impossible for the 
members of the family to read the book 
severally, as they wished to do, so it was 
finally agreed that Joe should read aloud dur- 
ing the long winter evenings. 

"I was not at all interested in these stories. 
They were long and to me unintelligible ; but I 
had my choice of keeping still and listening or 
of going to bed with the chickens, so I stayed. 
I paid no attention at first but tried to get 
some one to talk to me about the events on the 
farm or the gossip of the neighborhood. Every 
little while we were called to order and threat- 
ened with bed if we did not remain silent. 
Little by little, episodes in some of the stories 
caught my attention. At one time there would 
be some wild horse-play from one of Carlton's 
stories, or a wild chase after the smugglers. 
Gradually, I became more and more interested 
in certain of the stories that possessed action 
but very little literary merit. 

"Affairs reached a crisis for me on Ash 



A Widening Horizon 275 

Wednesday night, when, like 'Grandfather's 
Clock/ Joe stopped reading aloud. He was 
reading Redmond, Count O'Hanlon, or the 
Irish Raparee, and on the night before, he had 
left the robbers in a cave in the midst of a 
highly exciting melee. For us, Lent was a time 
of early to bed and early to rise, and more- 
over, night prayers and the rosary were said 
in common by the family shortly after supper ; 
so Joe determined to read for himself alone, 
as he could do this so much more rapidly than 
he could read aloud. 

"My imagination had been fired by the story 
and I asked him to finish it for me, but he paid 
no attention. The next day I found mother at 
leisure and begged her to read it for me, but 
her answer was, 'What interest can it have for 
you?' I begged my sister next, but she was 
afraid of being caught reading aloud to the 
omadhaun. Fortunately, the story was nearly 
finished and the print was large, so I took the 
book out to the barn and began to spell it out 
for myself, studying each letter in turn and 
pronouncing each syllable. My progress was 
slow enough, but I managed to finish the story." 



CHAPTER XXXIV 
The Turning Point 

"Don't you consider it a fortunate circum- 
stance, Doctor, that your brother stopped read- 
ing the story where he did, and that the other 
members of the family refused to finish it for 
you?" asked Miss Ruth. "Did not your joy 
over discovering that you could read for your- 
self more than compensate for the pain inflicted 
by their refusal ?" 

"To answer your question is not so simple 
as it might seem. There are a great many 
things to be taken into consideration. Of 
course, on the whole, I suppose I should con- 
sider the circumstance fortunate, but it was 
not an unmixed blessing. For instance, I con- 
tracted the habit of pronouncing each syllable 
aloud as my eye rested upon it, and this grad- 
ually hardened into a locked synergy between 
the movements of the eye and the movements 
of the vocal organs. 



The Turning Point 277 

"It was many years before I discovered the 
evil consequences of that hab'it, and then it was 
too late to remedy it, so that to this day, if my 
eye wanders to the last syllable of a word while 
I am trying to pronounce the first, I stumble 
hopelessly. The moment my eye passes from 
the note that I am singing, the vocal cords re- 
fuse to hold the pitch. As will readily be un- 
derstood, this is a rather serious handicap to 
one who is frequently called upon to read and 
sing in public, and it makes singing from the 
score practically impossible. 

"If I had had proper assistance in this new 
attempt to read, these consequences might eas- 
ily have been avoided. So that being forced 
to spell out the last chapter of the story un- 
aided had its dark side, and at the time there 
was nothing in the achievement calculated to 
give joy. 

"You see, it really wasn't learning to read. 
I could have read much better eight years pre- 
viously, and I was only conscious, as I plodded 
my way through the closing chapters of the 
story that I had lost whatever little ability I 



278 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

once possessed in this line. During the years 
that I spent away from school, and in which I 
made no attempt to read, the printed word had 
grown unfamiliar to my eye. The contrast of 
the present with the past was decidedly discour- 
aging. Moreover, I could hardly have helped 
contrasting my lumbering attempts to read with 
the excellent reading to which I had been listen- 
ing all winter. 

"Nevertheless, the spelling out of the words 
in those closing chapters of Redmond, Count 
O'Hanlon was a turning point in my life. The 
incident involved many things the full signifi- 
cance of which I did not understand until I 
took up the study of pedagogy years after- 
wards. 

"Perhaps the most significant element in the: 
situation was the motive that prompted this at- 
tempt to read. Reading in school was an en- 
tirely different affair. There the form was 
everything; the meaning was neglected. We 
devoted all our efforts to the correct pronun- 
ciation of the words, to the pauses, to the em- 
phasis, and to the inflections. It was purely a. 



The Turning Point 279 

gymnastic drill. What should have been the 
means was made the end. There was no soul, 
no life in the work. It was but another in- 
stance of the truth of the gospel maxim, 'The 
letter killeth, it is the spirit that giveth life.' 

"After all, it was probably fortunate for me 
that these early attempts to read failed; be- 
cause they were along false lines, and tempo- 
rary success could only have led me further 
from the true lines of development and induced 
me to accept the shadows for the substance. 

"My bungling attempts to read without the 
aid of a teacher at the age of sixteen, as I lay 
on the hay mow and pondered each syllable in 
turn, had in them something infinitely better 
than could have been produced by the best 
achievements along the old lines where the 
form replaced the substance in the focus of at- 
tention. 

"My reading was wretchedly poor, judged by 
any standard of elocution, but it was reading 
for content, and not for form, and in this re- 
spect it was a germ of mental life that was 
destined to have a large and vigorous growth. 



280 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

It opened the door, however, slightly, to new 
worlds that contained the accumulated treas- 
ures of all the ages. 

"The very difficulty which I encountered in 
this attempt to read was not without its advan- 
tages; it compelled me to read slowly, and my 
imagination thus secured time to complete each 
detail of the picture as I read. I could see the 
play of the sunlight and the shadow, I could 
see every detail of the garments of the actors 
in the scene, the expressions on their faces, 
their attitudes and their manner of walking. 

"In the course of time the inward drama 
that refused to be clothed in words mirrored 
itself for me in the clouds or in the clear blue 
sky, in the winds and waves, or in the sordid 
and hideous surroundings of festering human 
life in our great cities. The knowledge derived 
from books was thus thoroughly correlated with 
the previous content of my mind and unity 
in the developmental process was secured. 

"Fluency in speech has often proved a fatal 
gift. It deceives the thoughtless multitude 



The Turning Point 281 

who mistake the 'windy suspirations of forced 
breath' for eloquence, and glittering generali- 
ties for profound knowledge, and in time, the 
possessor of this fatal gift deceives himself and 
comes to accept the popular estimate as if it 
were the verdict of the competent. 

"I sometimes think that too great ease in 
reading leads to similar results. The eye runs 
over the printed page at such a rapid rate that 
it renders it impossible for the mind to grasp 
more than the mere outlines of the thought, 
and this mental food is so thin and unsubstan- 
tial that it cannot minister to healthy mental 
growth." 



CHAPTER XXXV 
A Resolve 

"We all have our hours of depression. Even 
the radiant joys of childhood suffer brief 
eclipse from time to time, and adolescence is 
characterized by more or less prolonged peri- 
ods of the dumps, from which even the most 
fortunate surroundings will not secure immu- 
nity. 

"There was very little sunshine in my youth ; 
all the circumstances were unfavorable, and I 
suffered accordingly during periods of the 
blues which reached their most acute stage in 
my sixteenth year. At this time the level 
monotony of my earlier years was beginning to 
break up. My mind, as we have seen, was de- 
veloping rapidly along several lines, and it 
carved more food than the immediate environ- 
ment supplied. 

"The stories that I had listened to during 



A Resolve 283 

the previous winter gave me glimpses into an 
outer world that had been hitherto unknown 
to me. Literature, in the better acceptation of 
the word, was wholly beyond me. But the oc- 
casional incidents that dealt with the rough 
life of rough men in those stories reached my 
intelligence and awakened my interest. 

"At this time, reading was in itself distaste- 
ful to me, nor had I formed any conscious pur- 
pose of acquiring proficiency in the art or of 
developing my mental powers. I simply craved, 
the excitement and the companionship that 
were denied me in my immediate environment. 
The occasional incident that appealed to me in 
the books that Joe had been reading aloud wa& 
hidden away in matter that was beyond my 
comprehension; hence, in my hours of loneli- 
ness and depression, I naturally turned else- 
where to find suitable reading matter. 

"Many of the workmen on the farm were 
from the pineries of the north, or from the min- 
ing camps of the west. They were rough in 
manner and rough of speech, and their stories 
were, for the most part, of drunken brawls 



284 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

and of the wild life of the frontier. I knew 
these men. I had seen them fight, I had lis- 
tened to their stories, and now, when the blue 
devils laid hold of me, I naturally turned to 
the wild west literature of which the men usu- 
ally had an abundant supply. 

"These stories were short; the print was 
large; the paper was poor. In fact, they were 
cheap in every sense of the word. The lan- 
guage was ungrammatical and vulgar; the 
moral tone was low; but they were all action. 
In such stories as 'Buffalo Bill,' 'Rosebud Rob' 
and 'The Giant of the Gulch' there was not a 
dull line for me, nor a passage that was above 
my comprehension. 

"Had they known of it, my parents would 
not have permitted me to read these stories, 
but they were busy about other things, and my 
repeated failures to learn to read had naturally 
lulled them into a false sense of security 
against danger from this source where I was 
concerned. 

"That Fall all the workmen were discharged, 
as we were about to move to a smaller farm. 



A Resolve 285 

This cut off my supply of wild west literature, 
but it had fulfilled its mission for me; it had 
built up in me a habit of reading that had 
grown into a passion. My taste had not im- 
proved, nor were there any valuable additions 
to my store of knowledge; but in the absence 
of the literature that I would have preferred 
I was compelled to turn to other sources for 
the reading matter that had become a necessity 
to me. 

"As I have said, the Fireside Companion, 
and the New York Ledger occasionally found 
their way into our home and to these I now 
turned in my hours of loneliness. The stories 
here were sensational and had not much to 
recommend them, either from a moral or from 
a literary point of view, but they were in every 
respect superior to the stories I had been read- 
ing. 

"The supply from these sources, however, 
was limited, while something to read had be- 
come an absolute necessity to me on rainy 
days and when the blue devils attacked me. 
On one of these occasions in the spring of 



286 The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard 

1879, Mrs. Southworth's Ishmael, or In the 
Depths, and its sequel, Self Raised, or From 
the Depths, fell into my hand. 

"As I still read very slowly, it took me sev- 
eral weeks to read these two volumes; but to 
me they were worth all the time that I gave 
them. In fact, the reading of these books 
marked a new stage in my development. 

"I saw myself reflected in Ishmael; he was 
a companion in misery. His 'depths/ though 
different in some respects from mine, were 
equally deep. Hand in hand with him I 
climbed, step by step, up out of the gloom into 
the sunshine of hope. With him I followed 
the old negro Professor of Odd- Jobs around 
the plantation and learned to make myself gen- 
erally useful; with him, I lay on the cabin 
floor, while the old negro taught us to read 
from the tattered pages of the family Bible ; in 
the light of his conduct, I realized that my 
sullen manner and violent temper were mis- 
takes, and I resolved to control myself and to 
be obliging to every body henceforth. 

"Of course I had sense enough to realize that 



A Resolve 287 

it was all a story, but this realization did not 
diminish the effect upon me of Ishmael's con- 
duct. It was possible to come up out of the 
depths! This was the matter of supreme im- 
portance to me. Moreover, I had caught a 
glimpse of the manner in which this ascent 
might be accomplished. Ishmael reached the 
United States Senate and became a great and 
good man. Of course I did not expect to imi- 
tate him in this, but as I closed the book I re- 
solved with a resolution in which the energies 
of my whole being were concentrated that I 
would rise from the condition in which I had 
lived for years. That the ascent would be slow 
and difficult I did not doubt, but no difficulty 
would have daunted me in that moment of ex- 
altation." 



INDEX 



A 

Abnormal child, the 

in educational theory 

and practice, 7 
number of, 12, 25 
Abstract principles and 
germinal truths, 
147, 148. 
Adolescence, mental 
changes during, 18. 
Ambition, awakening of, 

227. ■ 
Anticipations, 228. 
Argon, discovery of, 207. 
Atomic weights, 206. 
Atypical child, the, 58. 
causes of, 58. 
in school, 73. 
and grade work, 74, 

77. 
treatment of, 12, 74-76. 
number of, 12. 
Authority, 

role of in moral devel- 
opment, 18. 
conflict with evidence, 
126, 127, 229, 234. 



Backward children, educa- 
tion of by the 
Church, 8. 

Balance wheel, function of 
in mechanics, 175, 
176. 

Benefactors of the race, 
112. 

Bright children, and idle- 
ness, 78. 



Catechism, learning the, 

265. 
Cavendish, Henry, 205, 

206. 
Childhood, 

excursions to, 82. 
of the Dullard, 83. 
games of, 246, 247. 
Child study, 83. 

and the Dullard, 13. 
Christ's method of teach- 
ing, 149. 
Clinic, the psychological, 

63-65. 
Co-education, 28. 
Constructive imagination, 
200-202. 
foundation of, 185. 
Corporal punishment, 30- 

32, 43-48, 100. 
Cramming, effect of, 261, 

264. 
Creeds, conflict of, 19, 20. 
Cubic measurement, 125. 
and board measure- 
ment, 126, 128, 131. 
Customs, national and 
family, 
effect on mental de- 
velopment, 18-20. 
conflict of destroys 
reverence, 18, 19. 

D 

Day-dream, the, on the 
load of hay, 191. 

antecedents of, 196. 

verification of, 203, 
204, 210, 211. 



290 



Index 



Day-dreaming-, 186, 188, 
190-196. 217, 219. 
effect of, 217, 219, 221, 

236, 237. 
value of, 199. 
Deductive method, the 

sterility of, 144. 
Defectives, education of by 

the Church, 8. 
Demosthenes and the peb- 
bles, 40. 
Depths, 

in the, 286, 287. 
out of the, 287. 
Development, mental and 
sense experience, 
261. 
Diagnosis, a, 36, 40-42, 64. 
Digestion and mental 

work, 72. 
Discouragement, 210. 
and dullness, 74. 
and literature, 170. 
effects of, 50, 93, 108, 
244, 264. 
Discovery, 210. 

reward of, 224. 
subjective value of, 

212, 234, 246. 
objective value of, 246. 
and self-reliance, 121, 
131, 133, 134, 136. 
Disillusionment, 248, 251, 

258. 
Dullard, the, 

description of, 192. 
making of, 92. 
unmaking of, 123. 
his point of view., 15, 

104-106. 
discouragement of, 11. 
suffering of, 11. 
number of, 12 & 13, 25, 
57, 60-62. 



Dullard, the, 

a trial to parents and 
teachers, 11. 

sympathy for, 14, 15. 

ineffectual remedies, 
12. 

made bv the school, 11, 
57, 58, 92, 93. 

transformed into crim- 
inal, 11. 

treatment of, 76, 78, 
129. 

and genetic psycholo- 
gy, 13. 
Dull children, 

number of in public 
schools, 61. 

special schools for, in 

New York, 61. 

in England, 61, 62. 

in University of 

Pennsylvania, 62. 

education of by the 
Church, 8. 

treatment of, 76, 78, 
129. 

number of, 12, 57, 60. 
Dullness in children, 

cause of, 50-53, 94, 
128. 

discouragement, 74, 
102, 103. 

heredity, 55. 

malnutrition, 56. 

laziness, 56. 

defective sense or- 
gans, 56. 

low nerve tension, 73. 

alternating phases of 
development, 56-73. 



Education 

and environment, 26. 



Index 



291 



Education 

and abnormal child, 

7, 12, 25. 
and physical develop- 
ment, 113. 
Educational agencies, 215, 

216. 
Educational failures, 13. 
Educational therapeutics, 

7, 62, 63. 
Emotions 

effects of, 237. 
and mental develop- 
ment, 48. 
Environment of children, 
60. 
changes in, 16, 17. 
and education, 26. 
effect of on mental de- 
velopment, 111-114, 
138-142. _ 
and imagination, 114, 

138. 
and literature, 162- 
169. 
Executions and increase 

of crime, 48. 
Eye, training of, 124. 

F 

Failure 

effects of, 49, 53, 240, 

241, 269. 
and inhibition, 54. 
Farm machinery, 161. 
Father's curiosity, 231. 
Fear, effects of, 31, 37, 

38, 43, 44, 49-51. 
Feeling and education of 

children, 46, 47. 
Feminization, 29, 30. 
First impressions, 45. 
Frontier literature, 283, 

284. 



Genetic ps3^chology and 

the dullard, 13. 
Geometry, the beginnings 

of, 123-135. 
Germinal concept in me- 
chanics, 150. 
Germinal truths, 143. 

in teaching, 147, 148. 
function of, 146. 
and abstract princi- 
ples, 147, 148. 
Grace, operations of, 85. 
Grades, work of the, 75- 

77. 
Grading in New York 

schools, 58. 
Greek philosophers, meth- 
ods of, 148, 149. 
Grindstone, the experi- 
ment of the, 172. 
failure of, 173, 174. 
second failure of, 175. 
Partial success of, 
175. 
Groszmann, Dr., 12, 58. 
Grubbing machine, the, 
221. 
power of, 226, 227. 
Gymnastics, limitations of, 
114, 115. 

H 

Hall, G. Stanley, 28. 
Hay-pole, the, 151. 
Home 

and school, 21, 22. 
the industrial and its 
passing, 17-21. 
Hope, a ray of, 170-176. 
Horizon, a widening, 270- 
275. 



292 



Index 



Illusions, 242-248. 
Imagination, the cultiva- 
tion of, 131-133. 
Inductive method, abuse 

of, 145. . 
Industrial changes, the ef- 
fects of on children, 
17, 18. 
Industrial home, the 
its passing, 17-21. 
educational influence 

of, 18. 
and the school, 21, 22. 
and mental develop- 
ment, 25. 
Industrial training, 109- 

112, 114, 119. 
Inhibition 

and conduct, 47, 48. 
and failure, 54. 
Injustice, effects of on 

children, 238. 
Intellect and sense train- 
ing, 86. 
Interest in stories, 270. 
Invention, a successful, 

219-224. 
Ishmael, 286, 287. 

J 

Judicious praise, 177-183. 
help, 131. 

L 

Laziness, apparent, 56, 74. 
Lever, the, 150. 
in physics, 151. 
the orders of, 152. 
in relation to power 

and weight, 152. 
development of, 155. 
and the wheel, 156- 
161. 



Lever, the 

and its functions 156, 

159. 
of unequal arms, 159. 
in mechanics, 143. 
Library 

function of, 215, 216. 
an uninviting, 271. 
Literature 

and sense experience, 

162, 169. 
for the immature, 169. 
and discouragement, 

170. 
of the frontier, 283, 

284. 

M 

Machine, 144. 

definition of, 150. 
our master, 170. 
our mastery over the, 
171. 
Machine shop, a visit to, 

253, 254. 
Maguire, Margaret T., 65. 
Manual training, 109-114. 
Martyrs of science, 208. 
Mechanics 

the teaching of, 144. 
and the balance wheel, 
175, 176. 
Memories, early, 80, 83, 86. 
emotional tension and 
the permanency of, 
86. 
Memory pictures, 185, 200. 
limitations of, 132. 
value of, 133-136. 
Men ahead of their time 
misunderstood, 207, 

208. 
stumble on truths, 208, 
209. 



Index 



293 



Mental development 

influences operating 
on, 16. 

affected by environ- 
ment, 113, 114. 

and responsibility, 113- 
115. 

and authority, 18, 19. 

and sense training, 25, 
113, 114. 

Mental record, the, 45. 
emotions and the per- 
manency of, 45, 46, 
53, 86, 88, 108. 

Method 

of Greek philosophers, 

149. 
of Christ, 149. 
our master, 171. 
our servant, 171. 
the individual labora- 
tory, 214. 
of reading, 263. 

Mind, an awakening, 184, 

185, 217, 218. 
Minnesota, the bottoms, 

151. 
formation of, 139-141. 
Mistakes, the correction of, 

128, 131, 240, 241, 

251, 252. 
Moonbeams 

the dance of, 184- 

189. 
the parable of, 188-189. 
Motives, external and 

mental development, 

179. 
Multiplication, beginnings 

of, 201. 
Muscle sense, 185, 194, 198, 

217, 259. 
and intellect, 26. 



N 

Natural Bridge of Virgin- 
ia, scene at, 239. 
Natural order in teaching, 

147, 148. 
Nerve currents 

and vegetative func- 
tions, 71, 72, 96. 

and mental develop- 
ment, 71, 72, 96. 
Number concept, the 

development of, 118. 

and muscle sense, 118, 
119. 

and sight, 118, 119. 

and counting on fin- 
gers, 118. 

and delayed results, 
120. 

and first discovery, 
121. 

and real imagery, 121, 
122. 

O 

Obedience 

to individuals, 236. 
to principles, 235, 236, 

240. 
Old Oaken Bucket, 165- 

168. 
Omadhaun, Studevan's, 27, 

32, 80. 
the descent of, 98-106. 
the awakening of, 107. 
the childhood of, 85. 
early school days of, 

92-98. 
early memories of, 82- 

90. 
the first successes of, 

109-111. 



294 



Index 



Omadhaun, Studevan's 
the first journey of, 87, 

88 -. 
description of 92, 96, 

105, 109, 110. 

Ontogeny, a recapitulation 
of phylogeny, 213- 
215. 

Over-stimulation and pre- 
cocity, 58, 59, 77. 

Over wise, the 246. 



Pain of realization, 103. 
of awakening mind, 

179. 
beneficent role of, 108, 
109. 
Patents, 233. 
Periodic law, the, 206. 
Physical culture, 110-116. 
Physical and mental devel- 
opment 
alternating phases of, 
56, 67, 70, 71, 75, 116, 
117. 
balances between, 72, 

74, 95, 96, 101. 
relations to each other, 
73. 
Physiological psychology, 

33, 42, 43. 
Pilot Knob, 193. 
Pitchfork, the, 152, 154. 
Praise 

judicious, 177-183. 
premature, 178. 
as incentive to chil- 
dren, 178. 
injudicious, 178-180. 
Precocity 

and over-stimulation, 

58, 59. 
effects of, 74, 75, 78. 



Precocity 

and high nerve ten- 
sion, 73. 
and disease, 74. 
and stimulation, 74. 
the treatment of, 75, 
76. 
Problem, a new, 196-204. 
Progress, the greatest en- 
emy of, 208. 
Psychological clinic, the, 

63, 64, 65. 
Public schools 

inadequacy of, 22. 
exorbitant demands of 

of, 2Z 
narrow ideals of, 23. 
failure of, 24. 
Pulley, 158-160. 
Punishment and crime, 48. 

R 

Raleigh, 206. 

Read, learning to, 263, 
269, 275. 
a bad method of, 263, 

264, 277. 
unsuccessful attempts 
at, 265, 266. 
Reading 

compelled to listen to, 

273 274. 
for content, 275-279. 
the habit of, 285-287. 
a taste for, 185. 
Reapers, 196, 197. 

repairing the, 197, 198. 
a breakdown of the, 

203. 
and mechanical pow- 
ers, 203, 204. 
Rejection, a, 254. 
Religion and mental de- 
velopment, 18, 19. 



Index 



295 



Reprimand, a, 232. 

Resolve, a, 282-287. 

Resourcefulness, the ac- 
quisition of, 214. 

Retardation, mental, 65. 
of normal child, 
causes and reme- 
dies, 16. 

Retreat, difficulty of, 238, 
239. 

Ridicule, the effect of, 176, 
218, 222, 223. 

Rivers, the marriage of 
the, 195. 



Sedan chair, the, 152. 
See-saw, the, 151. 
Self-deception, 157, 158. 
Self-reliance, 54, 112, 136, 
214, 255-262. 
the growth of, 110. 
and discovery, 136. 
need of, 170-210. 
the dawn of, 171. 
and the perception of 
truth, 173. 
Sense experience and liter- 
ature, 162-169. 
Sense of touch, 185, 194, 
198. 
effect of in mental de- 
velopment, 259. 
Sense training, 109-112. 
and mental develop- 
ment, 24-26. 
and the foundations of 
mental life, 114. 
Sensory motor reaction 
and mental life, 260. 
School 

the function of, 215, 
216. 



School 

the new burden of, 17. 
industrial training in, 

17. 
the child's dislike of, 
93-95, 100, 101. 
Science 

the builders of, 205- 

210. 
the martyrs of, 208. 
discoveries in, 209-213. 
short cut to, 214. 
the need of co-opera- 
tion in, 215. 
Shakespeare, the source of 

his genius, 261. 
Social changes, effects on 

children, 18. 
Spatial relationships, ele- 
mental concepts of, 
123. 
Specialization, injury of 

too early, 179, 180. 
Spelling bad, a cure for. 

65, 66. 
Speer method, the, 135, 136 
Stammering 

the cause of, 31, 36-38, 

49. 
a remedy for, 39, 40, 
66. 
Stories, value of to chil- 
dren, 272. 
Strength and stubborn- 
ness, 235. 
Stretcher, the, 152. 
Strutting, 244. 
Stubbornness and 

strength, 235. 
Studevan's omadhaun 

the story of, 14. 
Success 

effect of, 110-112, 121, 
238. 



296 



Index 



Success 

dangers of, 178-183. 
causes self-conscious- 
ness, 244, 245. 



Talents, special, 164. 

Teacher, the function of, 
215, 216. 

Teachers, the mistakes of, 
92, 99, 100-102. 

Teaching 

abstract principles in, 

147, 148. 
germinal truths in, 
147, 148. 

Therapeutics, psychologi- 
cal, 63, 64. 

Thomas, St., 83, '84. 

the childhood of, 84. 

Thought, the frontiers of, 
186. 

Three R's, the 

in place of sense train- 
ing, 21. 
in the public schools, 
21-23. 

Tools, the use of, 124. 

Transitory phases, 249- 
254. 

Trial, a successful, 224, 
229-233. 



Triumph, the first, 229-232. 
Truancy, the causes of, 

22-24. 
Truth 

and self-reliance, 173. 
in relation to achieve- 
ment, 174. 
rediscovering funda- 
mental, 211-218. 
verifying fundament- 
al, 214. 
Turning point, a, 276-281. 

U 

Unbalanced tendencies, 73- 
76. 

W 

Ways, the parting of the, 
233-241. 

Well, the, 162. 

drawing water from, 
163, 164. 

Wetblanket, a family, 225- 
228. 

Wheel, generated from ro- 
tating lever, 156-161. 

Wheel and axle, 161. 

Witmer, Dr., 63. 

Wright, Professor Joseph, 
67. 



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